


bird bones

by sashawire



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Magnus Archives Fusion, Archivist Rita, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Minor Character Death, Rita-centric (Penumbra Podcast), ft. me having WAY too much fun designing everyone's avatarsonas, juno steel says fuck, listen this is. meant to be a lighthearted fic but some fucked up stuff DOES happen, not-them fuckery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:54:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25223479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sashawire/pseuds/sashawire
Summary: Rita fumbled with the tape recorder. “Okay! Statement of, uh, Cassandra Kanagawa, regarding…”“A lot of things,” Cass crossed her arms. “But I guess it started with the time my stepmother buried me alive.”“Thanks, Miss Kanagawa. Anyway, statement begins.”...In which there is an Institute, there is an Archivist (better known as Rita), and there is an apocalypse prevented through a couple of close calls and the power of friendship.
Relationships: Buddy Aurinko/Vespa, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel, Rita & Everyone
Comments: 14
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **disclaimer:** I know there are other magnus archives AUs for tpp, and I haven't read any of them, so I'm _really_ sorry if there's any overlap between this fic and others.
> 
> in rita's dialogue, i don't misspell words to signify how she speaks (i.e. "ya" and "Mistah") mostly because i feel like it would get annoying after a while lol. just know that she still talks like that.
> 
> **some content warnings:** guns, knife violence, gaslighting, claustrophobia, entomophobia, mentions of manipulative parents (min kanagawa), mentions of attempted suicide (ingrid lake), non-graphic mentions of someone pouring acid onto their own face, dehumanization, mentions of slavery (vespa), mentions of animals being harmed.

“Y’know, the big boss man upstairs likes to believe he's got the greatest, most organized archive of supernatural shit on the planet. The rest of us work here.”

“That's very nice and dramatic and all, Mister Steel, but please get out of my office chair.”

*

“Wow, this place is a mess,” Rita complained to no one in particular, blowing dust off a cardboard box. Upon lifting the lid, she noted the files were stuffed in haphazardly, dog-eared and some bent to the point of ripping.

This was certainly a challenge. Rita knew organized chaos, she  _ invented  _ organized chaos.

This little cupboard-office wasn’t organized chaos. It was what Frannie would call “complete and utter disarray.” Rita sighed fondly. Her Frannie always was very eloquent.

The office door creaked open, and one of her assistants poked his head in. (Rita still wasn’t quite sure what she was supposed to do with these new assistants, or what she was supposed to do with this sudden new promotion to a field she didn’t know anything about, but boy was she glad not to be alone in this dusty basement!)

The assistant, broad-shouldered and sheepish, said, “Uh, hello, Miss—uh—”

“Rita is fine!”

“Okay, hello, nice to meet you miss Miss Rita,” he fumbled. “I and I  _ really  _ don’t want to interrupt your… whatever you’re doing, but y’know that statement? The really creepy one where the lady’s dog kept getting taller and taller and, like, watched her at night and all? It won’t… record.”

“What d’ya mean?” Well,  _ this _ Rita knew. She’d worked in the institute’s tech department before the whole promotion thing, and she wasn’t too humble to say she was one of the best. The best!

“I mean, I recorded the statement like you said, but when I played it back it was all…” the assistant—Mister Mercury, she remembered—made a drawn-out  _ sh-h _ sound, “...broken radio noises.”

“I’d be happy to take a look at it for you!” Rita chirped, feeling herself begin to vibrate happily. (She  _ knew _ tech, even when it was acting up like her cranky niblings.)

Mister Mercury relaxed visibly. “Thanks, Miss Rita! I didn’t wanna bother you, I swear, but… I love Jay, I really do, and you know he’s not too patient when it comes to tech and stuff…”

Rita grinned, and followed Mister Mercury out the door. She had a feeling they were going to get along  _ just  _ fine.

*

“You’re…  _ demoting me?!” _

“I can assure you, Miss Sasha, what I’m doing is the exact opposite of demoting.”

Sasha closed her eyes, counted to three. “I apologize for my tone, sir, but I can’t see how sending me down into the  _ Archives _ is a promotion from working directly under and with you.”

“And I can’t blame you for that. Think of this as a test, my dear. If you can last down there long enough, I will be more than happy to have you take my place, overseeing everything.”

She held back a scoff, would sooner die than show disrespect to her superiors. But, still. Did he really think Sasha Wire might not be tough enough to survive a couple dull months?

Well, if it was the company, that was a  _ bit _ more understandable. No secret to anyone that Juno Steel was a handful, in several different ways depending on who you asked. But she knew how to deal with Juno, too.

“I respect your decision, even if I don’t understand it,” Sasha very deliberately did  _ not _ grit her teeth. “I’ll begin packing my things right away, sir.”

*

“Mick?!”

“Sash?!”

“What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“Well, this weird old guy approached me on the street, said he had a job offer. Which was great! Because I was, uh, well, the door-to-door sixteenth-hand car selling thing didn’t really pan out. So he led me down a dark alley—my foot squelched on this weird lump, which was kinda gross—and told me…”

This really was a test of her patience, huh.

*

“I followed up on that case with the buzzing noises,” Mister Steel tossed the file onto her desk. “Guy’s dead. Found looking like he’d shoved his head  _ right  _ though a wasps’ nest.”

“D’ya think that’s what he did?” Rita frowned, picking up the paper. “I dunno about that, Mister Steel, he sounded awful scared in his statement.”

Mister Steel shrugged. “I’ve heard wasps can smell fear,” he offered. “Or, that might’ve been horses. Or dogs. Anyway, no evidence was found of the supposed ‘floating nest that buzzed just out of sight at all times’. My guess is auditory hallucinations and paranoia.”

Rita shifted, dissatisfied in a way that didn’t really make sense. The poor man was dead and they’d gathered all the evidence they could, but it didn’t sit right just to leave it open-ended like this.

“—about Strong’s disappearance,” Ooh, Mister Steel was still talking, she  _ probably _ should’ve been listening. “Couldn’t reach her fiancée, nothing new there, but I heard from some of the research department folk that she kept a, a journal, or something—”

“Mister Steel,” Rita interrupted. “I’m real touched that you’re so worried about me and everything, and I love you too, but I really don’t think Miss Alessandra Strong’s disappearance is tied to her musty old archivist job.”

Juno crossed his arms, scowling. “It’s fishy, alright? She was acting weird, spending more and more time down  _ here _ of all places—”

Rita tuned him out, this time on purpose. He’d said essentially the same thing when she was promoted and chose him to be one of her assistants. No way was he gonna let her work in this weird creepy basement alone after the last woman vanished under mysterious circumstances, is what he’d said, in Juno Steel-speak. Which was basically that but with more swear words in between.

“—either the cops or the mob, which doesn’t help, because it’s  _ always _ either the cops or the mob. Or some rich person with police-slash-mob ties. Or both.” Mister Steel narrowed his eyes. “You’re not even listening, are you?”

“‘Course I am, Mister Steel, I’m just thinkin’ about other things at the same time. Multitasking!” She rested her cheek on her hand. “The statements still don’t work on the computers. Nothing I try works. That’s never happened before!”

Juno blinked, looking genuinely surprised. “I don’t know,” he scratched the back of his neck. “This building’s all kinds of fucked up. Maybe there’s… bad Wi-fi in the walls or something. Have you tried old fashioned stuff?”

Rita didn’t bother correcting him on the Wi-fi thing. “You mean tape recorders, things like that?”

“Yeah. My m—we didn’t have computers around the house when I was a kid, but we had crappy analog shit lying around. You can get them pretty cheap nowadays.”

“Thanks for the suggestion, Mister Steel! I’ll have to look into it,” she said, already racing through online sites she knew to sell stuff like that.

*

Rita did look into it, and as it turned out, Juno was right.  _ (For once, _ is what Sasha would’ve tacked onto that, but Rita found that Mister Steel was right a lot of the time as long as it didn’t involve emotions or anything sappy like that.)

*

“Hey, some of these statements are actually pretty cool! I mean, you could make, like, a podcast out of these, or somethin’!”

“Sounds like a fun way to get sued for breach of confidentiality. Like, insta-sued. Boom, ‘teleported straight into the courtroom’ sued.”

“Lay off him, Juno. Since when have  _ you  _ ever cared about the law?”

“Uh, I was a detective once, too. Did spending so much time with an old guy make your brain age by osmosis?”

“You think I have an ‘old brain’ because  _ you _ have the maturity of a four-year-old. Also, if by ‘once’ you mean three days, then sure, I remember you as a detective.”

“Alright—!”

*

Rita adjusted her glasses and clicked on the tape recorder. “Statement of Blair Rockridge—” she peered down at the file— “Regarding her hiring of the entity identifying itself as Perseus Shah. Um, voiced by me, Rita! Y’know, the head archivist. Statement begins.”

*

“Hey, Sash, how’s Annie doing?” Mick swung his chair onto its back legs. “I haven’t seen her around recently. She okay?”

Sasha frowned. “You saw her just yesterday. She came down from artifact storage to have lunch with us. Are  _ you _ okay, Mick?”

Mick laughed. “Aw, c’mon, you know that’s not what I meant. The other Annie was lovely and all, but I’m talking about  _ your _ Annie. Our Annie!”

“Our—that  _ was _ our Annie,”

A groan from across the room. “Mick, buddy, I  _ told _ you those bath salts were a bad idea.” Juno huffed, and sat up straighter. “I’ll take you to the hospital after work, just, try not to snap and kill us all before then. Also, you owe me fuel money in advance.”

Mick was getting more and more bewildered. “Jayjay, I swear on my dog's grave that I never took those bath salts. I mean, I looked it up, and you were right actually, people were going nuts and—” he cut himself off. “Heh. This is a joke, right?”

“What in God’s name are you on about?” Sasha asked, concerned.

“Other Annie doesn’t even look like our Annie, though. She’s all tall and blondie, so it’s weird that you guys could even get ‘em mixed up, especially you, Sasha—”

Sasha turned to Juno, who shrugged. “Mick,” he called. “Mick Mercury. ‘Our Annie’ has always been ‘tall and blondie’. Don’t you remember when we were kids and I was always pissy about how Annie was taller than me even though she was younger?”

No, Mick doesn’t remember. In his memories, Annie was small and dark-haired, like a compact version of her older sister. (It wasn’t hard to imagine Jay as ‘always pissy’ though. No offence.)

“I…” Mick wasn’t often lost for words, but it felt like peanut butter had stuck in his throat and his head throbbed.

“Mick, man, seriously. Are you okay?”

Mick’s brow crinkled, and he gazed back at the worried faces of his friends. “What?” he asked.

*

Rita fumbled with the tape recorder. “Okay! Statement of, uh, Cassandra Kanagawa, regarding…”

“A lot of things,” Cass crossed her arms. “But I guess it started with the time my stepmother buried me alive.”

“Thanks, Miss Kanagawa. Anyway, statement begins.”

*

“...and my lungs filled with pebbles, clay and soil caked every surface of my insides. But even as my vision got spotty around the edges, I—I wasn’t  _ scared. _ I wasn’t thinking about the mud under my nails or the sand between my teeth. Dirt crushed against me from every direction, but it was like a hug. A cool, wet, all-consuming hug.”

Cassandra’s eyes went dreamy then, running a hand through her hair. Rita pretended not to notice the dry, black soil that rolled from her hairline, down the side of her face.

“It was just, everything went quiet.  _ Silent. _ I couldn’t even hear myself breathing, because I  _ wasn’t. _ You ever watch my brother’s shows, Archivist?”

“Eh, sometimes,” Rita shrugged. “When they’re on. But Mister Kanagawa’s voice is  _ real _ loud and showy, so I can’t watch ‘em in the office or I get in trouble.”

“That’s how he  _ is, _ inside his shows and out. Always switched on, performing for an audience that isn’t there. And my stepmother is all—” Miss Kanagawa turned her voice to a syrupy soprano—  _ “sweetheart, darling, I’ll refer to you as my beloved daughter as I stab you in the gut.” _

Rita blinked.

“So much of my goddamn life is loud, performative chaos, and you don’t realize how tiring it all is until you can just lie there, in perfect silence.” Cassandra’s voice was hushed now, the crackling like gravel. “Whether I was awake or asleep for most of it, I couldn’t tell you. Time is different down there. But by the time the earth delivered me back to the surface, it had been four days and my family thought I was dead.

“I still go down there when I have free time, of course. Find a hole in the ground to lie in until it takes me. But I can’t stay down there all the time. I’ve got work to do.”

Behind Miss Kanagawa’s teeth, there was just black. Rita couldn’t see a tongue, a throat, anything. She worried slightly that Cassandra Kanagawa was just sand and soil on the inside, like one of those creepy vintage dolls.

Rita cleared her throat. “Is that it, Miss Kanagawa?”

“All I’m willing to tell you, yeah.”

“I mean, there’s this weird old well behind my apartment building, if you ever wanna take a li’l nap down there,” she offered.

Cassandra’s lips twitched, but she didn’t smile. “Thanks for the offer, Archivist-Rita.”

“No problem, um, Kanagawa-Miss!”

*

There was this carving of an eye, right above the doorway to Rita’s office, that Mister Steel loved to gripe about.

“Look at that thing, Rita! No matter  _ where _ I sit in the office, it’s always just _ there.” _ He shuddered. “Staring at me.”

“Stop whining, Juno.” Miss Wire called.

“Doesn’t seem like too big a deal to me, Mister Steel.” Rita said, munching on salmon-flavoured chips. “Unless there’s a secret camera hidden in it, like in  _ Large Sibling: Is Viewing You.” _

Mister Mercury was unusually quiet, probably still thinking about the Annie thing. Rita didn’t think it was too big of a deal. She got her cousins mixed up all the time! Always referring to Jessie as Jesse and vice versa. A bit embarrassing, but not crisis-worthy.

“Anyway, I don’t think Mister O’Flaherty would be too happy if you took it down without asking,” Rita finished.

*

“Statement of Ingrid Lake, regarding…”

“Several instances of my own demise, of course!”

“...Uh-huh. What she said! Statement begins.”

*

“The fourth time it happened, we were trying to slit our own throats. Or,  _ I _ was trying. The last thing I saw before my fourth death was my darling Vicky, dropping the blade I had gifted her, backing away.”

Miss Lake’s eyes were shimmering blue as a flame, and flat as a puddle. Nothing behind them.

“I woke up a couple days later, alive as I never was, and set about cleaning the blood from my frock. Oh, alas, it didn’t work, and I ended up burning it. I’ve died a couple times since then, never stuck, even tried to bring Vicky dear along with me on occasion. She hasn’t gotten more receptive to the idea since our first try, unfortunately, but I’ve got the rest of her life to keep convincing her!”

Rita looked down at Miss Lake’s hands, clasped neatly on her lap. They were so colourless, greyish like the rest of her. Rita had trouble believing Ingrid had blood inside her in the first place, but it felt rude to point out.

“I think, when my job is done, when it’s time for my  _ true _ end, I’d like it to be up there,” Miss Lake tilted her head towards the ceiling, towards the invisible sky above. “Only three people have ever died in space, you know that? There’s so much of it untouched. To die up there, with the stars, in a spot no one before you has ever died, well. That’s the sweetest death anyone could hope for, isn’t it?”

Rita wasn’t too sure about that, but Ingrid didn’t seem to have any reservations about murder, so she thought better of voicing her doubts. “That sounds real pretty, Miss Lake,” she said instead.

“It does, doesn’t it.” Ingrid Lake herself was rather pretty, too. But not in a nice way, that made you want to cuddle with her and go on dates together and kiss her adorable cheeks. She was pretty like a body in a coffin, hair all done up, makeup hiding the emptiness underneath. Untouchable.

Rita shivered. She wanted to pick up the phone right this second to tell Missus Valles Vicky to watch out, but she didn’t think Miss Lake would be happy about that. “You seem nice, Miss, but I’m afraid you can’t die in this institute, thank you. The boss wouldn’t take it well.”

Ingrid laughed. “Oh, Rita dear, I wouldn’t worry about that.” She smiled, and everything about her was cool and perfect. “This place is plenty tainted enough.”

*

“Miss Rita,” Sasha Wire poked her head into the office, face stony as ever. “There’s a door in the Archives.”

“Well, ain’t there always, Miss Wire?” Rita replied, scribbling her thoughts on the latest statement down in the form of a picture of an apple pie. “We gotta get out of here somehow.”

Miss Wire stepped further into the office. “There’s a new door. It wasn’t there when we came in this morning. I thought you should know, just in case.”

Rita finished drawing the tartan of the blanket the pie was resting on, then put down her pen. “Huh. Reminds me of a case, somethin’ about a door and an angel and… jaywalking? Maybe…”

She replayed the statement in her mind as Miss Wire slipped back out the door, Rita herself following suit soon after. And sure enough, right where there used to be an overflowing file cabinet, was now a door, plain and wooden.

Mister Steel had a pistol aimed at it, glancing towards the two women as they approached. “You guys know what we’re supposed to do here? Got any emergency door protocol?”

“I dunno. Should we…?” Rita was reaching for the handle before she finished her own sentence, curiosity overflowing.

Miss Wire pulled her back. “Absolutely not.”

Mister Mercury was out looking for a follow-up on the statement about the man whose cat kept disappearing and showing up again with the wrong number of limbs, so it was just the three of them, watching the door for any sudden change.

“Maybe we should, I don’t know, set up a camera or something,” Mister Steel suggested. “I’m not standing here for three hours if nothing’s gonna happen.”

Just as he said that, though, the golden doorknob began to turn, slowly. And then, with the shallowest of creaks, the door opened, and a man stepped out.

There was something  _ wrong _ about him. He was far too tall to fit through that doorway without ducking, but he stayed perfectly upright, like the door moved to fit him instead of the other way around. His fingers were so long they should’ve been impractical, like that time Rita tried wearing three inch fake nails, but these were even  _ longer. _ He stepped into the Archives like something straight out of a funhouse mirror, closing the door behind him.

(Rita got lost in one of those funhouses for six hours when she was younger, and she hasn’t really liked thinking about them since.)

“Hello,” he said, in a voice that sounded like it came from the inside of a microwave. “It’s lovely to meet you all, at last.”

“Who the hell are you?” Mister Steel demanded, not lowering the gun.

The too-tall man clasped his hands behind his back. “What kind of answer are you looking for, not-Archivist? A role? A name? It’ll be hard to give you either, really, I go by a lot of things. The Deceit, the Crooked One, the Throat of—”

“Oh, cut the bullshit,” Juno snapped. “You got, like, a normal name? Christopher? Michael? Don’t tell me your parents looked at baby-you and went ‘Oh, we’ll name him the Twisty Man,’ or whatever the fuck.”

Rita couldn’t see the Deceit-Crooked-Throat’s eyes behind his near-opaque sunglasses, but the tilt of his head implied interest. “Would you be surprised if they did? I am a rather twisty man, as you can see.”

“What are you, a yoga teacher?”

“For  _ you, _ I could be,”

“Okay!” Miss Wire threw up her hands. “That’s enough. Tell us why you’re here before I shoot you in those fancy cowboy boots.”

“I think you’ll find your vocal chords will have vacated your throat long before you can point a gun anywhere near my boots,” Crooked Guy replied, microwave-cheery as ever.

Mister Steel narrowed his eyes. “Yeah? You and what weapon?”

“These,” Twisty held up his hand, which was fair, because his fingers were about half as long as Rita and just as sharp. “But, there’s not much point in hiding my reason for visiting, I suppose. Enchanté, New Archivist.”

Rita blinked at the outstretched hand presented to her, internally went  _ oh yeah, _ and shook it. Her hand was swallowed entirely by Deceit-Man’s. “Lovely to meet you too, Mister…”

“...Glass,” Mister Glass finished, glancing at Mister Steel for just a split second. “Rex Glass.”

*

Mister Glass stuck around for just a bit longer, after that. He turned down her offer to take his statement, instead choosing to flirt with Mister Steel, in a manner that Frannie would have referred to as  _ ‘obscene’. _

Rita thought it was kinda cute.

*

Mick stared down at the picture of Annie Wire on his phone. Tall, blonde, heart-shaped face.

Not right. Their Annie was short and brunette, with a squarish jaw.

But in the picture, Annie was squished in a selfie between Mick and Sasha. She stuck her tongue out.

Not right. Their Annie had a tongue piercing, this one didn’t.

(He didn’t remember that selfie being taken. Not with Other Annie. But hey, Mick Mercury forgot a lot of things.)

Sasha and Jay were just… mixed up, or something. Maybe they were closer with Artifact Storage Annie than he thought.

Right?

*

“Hello, everyone! This is Cecil Kanagawa, recording to you from an office basement. I’m here to give you a statement regarding…”

“The bugs?” Rita prompted. “You were goin’ on about the bugs.”

“Why, thank you, dear Archivist!” Mister Kanagawa crowed into the tape recorder. “You see, I was stung by a bee when I was five years old, and I don’t think I’d ever before had so much attention lavished upon me. That was the gateway drug, of sorts, that set me onto my current career track…”

*

“...I’ve heard the complaints, you know. Cassie’s always on about it, ‘Cecil, stop pretending you’re talking to an audience when there’s no one there, it’s annoying,’” Mister Kanagawa lowered his voice to a comically gruff grumble. “But that’s where she’s  _ wro-ong. _ There’s always an audience, if you know where to look.”

Mister Kanagawa turned towards one of the shadowed corners of the room (Rita didn’t  _ mean _ to have her office all dark and dismal, that’s why she stuck posters and stickers all over the walls, but there was only so much she could do with a single light fixture. For now) and made some strange, high-pitched cooing noises.

Three brown moths flitted out of the darkness, landing perched on the tape recorder. “He- _ llo _ my dear and lovely audience, aren’t you just  _ darlings?” _ Cecil wagged a finger at the moths, allowing one of them to crawl onto him. “You were listening in the whole time, weren’t you? Of course you were!”

Rita took a good look at Cecil Kanagawa, wrapped in expensive furs. The combination of the enormous, fluffy scarf completely concealing his neck, and the fractal sunglasses that sat dangerously close to the end of his nose, well. To Rita, he kinda looked like a moth himself.

“Your, erm, your audience is sure is cute, Mister Kanagawa,” Rita said. “You should bring them onto the show someday.”

“My, aren’t you the charmer? But thank you, they’re very flattered to hear that,” Mister Kanagawa replied. “You’ve been sweet to me, Rita the Archivist, if  _ you  _ ever want an appearance on my show, all you have to do is ask.”

“Thanks for the offer, Mister,” Rita beamed back at him. She was honoured, honestly! But she’d much rather watch Mister Kanagawa’s show than be part of it. She’ll end up with more of her limbs attached to her that way.

*

“I’m  _ telling _ you, Strong’s disappearance is suspicious! Someone’s acting erratically for a while and then they just  _ up and disappear _ and you don’t think maybe we should look into it?”

“Leave it to the police, Juno. We’re just the archival assistants.”

“They’re useless and you  _ know _ it. Don’t give me that,”

“That’s why we’re not detectives anymore, isn’t it? It’s none of our concern.”

“I don’t believe that for a second, Sasha.”

“Then don’t.”

*

Rita clicked on the tape recorder. “Statement of Julian DiMaggio, regarding the entity pretending to be his husband. Voiced by yours truly, Rita! Head archivist and all that. Statement begins.”

*

The tape recorder kept recording, but the moment Rita was out of that crazy head-fuzz she got into while reading a statement, she dropped the file in her hands with a clatter.

At the bottom of the page, handwriting Rita recognized as Miss Strong’s read,  _ another Not-Them statement. It’s getting greedy. _

“Oh no,” Rita muttered rapidly into the empty air. “Oh no, oh  _ no, _ Miss Annie.”

*

“Huh. You came back.”

A sigh like a throatful of static. “Yes. And I do wish we could’ve reunited under better circumstances but—well. I need a favour, and I thought that this may be mutually beneficial for us.”

“Uh-huh. You gonna give me a real name to work with? And don’t even start with the whole ‘They call me the Contortionist’ crap.”

“I told you, I don’t have a name. Call me Duke Rose, if you’d like.” A pause, and then, “I need to talk to someone about a, a mutual pest of ours. A very, very big pest. She wouldn’t take too kindly to me, as I am, though, so I’m forced to call in backup.”

“And how does this benefit me, exactly?”

“I’ve heard you’ve been searching for one Alessandra Strong?”

*

The Archives had a weird relationship with Artifacts Storage.

Rita wasn’t the best when it came to social intricacies and all that, but when she crossed the threshold into cluttered shelves and stacks of miscellaneous items, there was this air of wrongness. Like something there didn’t want her coming any closer.

Whenever Rita stopped to have lunch with someone from Artifacts, (because Miss Swift really was so gorgeous, and  _ strong, _ and well, any lady would drop everything to share a meal with her) the subject of either of their work, Archives or Storage, would rarely be broached. Even if it was, it was shut down quickly and vaguely.

Talking with the research departments was different. They had fun nattering on about their work, and Rita had fun listening, but with Artifacts Storage, it was there was some sorta… solidarity, or something. They both knew weird things happened, weird things that weren’t talked about.

Rita looked around Storage, couldn’t find who she was looking for, so she sat in a plushy armchair and waited.

Only that armchair grew literal hands and started grabbing at her shoulders and ankles and tried to pull her inside it, so she got up and sat on a stool instead.

A couple of people came by, asked what was going on, but Rita just told them she was waiting for someone and they left her alone.

She swung her legs. A creaking sound came from her right. (Or her left. She did the hand signals thing and nope, definitely her right.)

Rita stopped, and the creaking came again, followed by small, heavy footsteps.

“Hello?” Rita called. “Is that you, Miss Annie?”

The footsteps grew louder, and a blonde woman poked her head around a pile of books. “Oh, hello Rita,” Annie (or not) said. “What brings you up here?”

“I—Miss, um, I wanted to talk to you, please,” Rita felt herself begin to squirm, and her voice felt awfully small.

“Well, what about?” Annie deftly avoided the  _ arm _ chair and chose to lean against a wardrobe that seemed to have a face carved into it. A horrible, screaming face. That blinked. “Is my sister alright?”

“Oh, yes, she’s fine. Fi-ine,” Rita drew the word out, unsure of how to broach the subject of what Annie was, or, really, wasn’t. She clacked her heels together repeatedly, gathering courage. “Haveyougottenyourhairdyedrecently!”

Not-Annie tilted her head. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

Rita took in a massive breath, and said, “Have you gotten your hair dyed recently?”

“No?” Not-Annie blinked exactly once, as if she just remembered she had to do that. “My hair’s always been this colour. Bit of an odd one out in my family. The milkman’s daughter, they say.”

“Re-eally…” Rita pursed her lips. “It’s just, according to some sources, you’re  _ supposed _ to be a brunette.”

Not-Annie laughed, and it was needle-thin. “I have no idea what you’re on about, Archivist,” she tucked a blonde strand behind her ear. Her fingers had too many knuckles. “And I’m afraid you don’t have a shred of evidence to the contrary.”

Rita swallowed, and twisted her hands in her lap. “I know, Miss Not-Annie.” She said. “I—what you’re doing is—is  _ cruel. _ Real, real cruel. But, I mean, you already know that.”

Not-Annie smiled, and didn’t answer.

*

She thought Mister Steel might believe her, if she told him. He was, well, she loved him and all, but he was very paranoid and this seemed right up his alley. And it would provide an explanation for Mister Mercury’s state. Everyone else in the Archives (which was the three of them) were getting more and more and more worried about him.

But Miss Wire? Miss Sasha Wire was a very rational person, she really was, but this was her  _ sister. _ Or, Miss Wire  _ thought _ it was her sister. It was  _ about _ her sister, anyway.

Miss Wire could have all the ‘keep a level head, assess the facts’ rules she liked, it didn’t change the fact that Rita would have to convince her that her sister was, was  _ dead _ when in Miss Wire’s eyes, she was right  _ there. _

(And that’s the crux of it, ain’t it? Miss Annie Wire was dead, and replaced by this awful mimic. Rita had half a mind to compare it to all those shows where one twin impersonates the other, but it was even  _ worse _ than that.)

Miss Wire was a rational person, but since  _ Rita _ found it so hard to even process the situation at hand, she didn’t think Sasha Wire would believe her for a second.

*

“And this is the residence of…?”

“Knock on the door and find out for yourself. Ask to speak to Missus Strong. You’re affiliated, but you’re still only human, so she  _ might  _ be willing to talk to you.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re spilling, after this.”

“If Strong doesn’t tell you about the powers first, I suppose.”

*

Rita found a moth fluttering in a murky old corner of the Archives. She picked up a mug and a magazine from her desk, and had to stand on her tiptoes  _ on top of _ her desk chair to even be able to reach it.

She trapped the moth inside the mug, braced against the magazine, and clambered off the chair (with care, she didn’t want to  _ die) _ to carry it upstairs. Some one-handed struggle, and the window was open, letting the moth fly away into the night.

Then Rita saw her magazine, and gasped in horror. The dregs of her tea had stained the front page, ruining the cover-lady’s pretty clothes.

Oh, the sacrifices she makes!

*

A woman, vaguely familiar, opened the door. She squinted at Juno with no little suspicion. “Who the hell are you to be calling at this hour?” She asked.

“What hour? It’s only—” he checked his watch— “ne-evermid. I’m here to talk to Strong. Alessandra. Alessandra Strong.”

The woman gave him a cautious once-over. “I’ven’t a clue what you’re talking about.” She grunted. “My Alessandra’s been missing for weeks. I’ve already talked to the cops.”

And then Juno could finally place her face. Strong’s fiancée, set to be married just two months after the day of her disappearance. (He remembered, distinctly, reading about it and feeling sick. Whatever.)

“I have reason to believe she’s in this house right now,” Juno tried to keep his voice light through an obvious lie.

“What the  _ hell _ are you talking abo—”

“O-kay!” Duke interceded, stepping into the woman’s view. “Ma'am, I must inform you that we are  _ not _ here on behalf of the police. There's no point in lying to us, Juno here is from the Archiv—”

“You!” The woman snapped, eyes suddenly wild. “You're one of them! For  _ God's  _ sake, why can't you just leave us  _ alone? _ Alessandra has done  _ everything _ to escape from you, you monsters, and you can't even let us live in the privacy of our own—”

“Uh, ma'am?” Juno cut in. “I gotta admit, I haven't a goddamn clue what you're talking about. I'm… a… human, at least mostly, I  _ think, _ though I can't speak for Mister Fingers over here.”

Duke Rose's (bright, multicoloured) eyes flashed with, was that  _ hurt? _ Before his face smoothed and he said, “Yes, well. I can't say the same, but if it makes you feel any better, I will… remain on this side of the threshold.”

“It does.” The woman replied sharply, before rounding on Juno. “Are you the new Archivist?”

Juno swallowed. “That would be my fr—boss, actually. I'm one of the assistants.”

Strong's fiancée sighed. “Good enough. Come in, my Alessandra's been meaning to talk to you.”

*

Rita saw a woman watching her from across the street. She was tall, real tall, with red hair and the darkest, most gorgeous eye.

She watched Rita, not hungrily, not like a meal, but like a curiosity. Like something odd she hadn't intended on catching in her net.

The woman caught her eye, and nodded. Rita blinked back, and tried for a smile. The red-haired lady slid back into the crowd.

*

Strong's fiancée led (dragged, more like, by God this woman was a powerhouse) him to a sitting room, and flipped on the light, before turning back into the darkened hall.

“Alessandra?” He heard her call. “Someone from the Archives is here, if you want to talk to him.”

Another woman's voice answered something back, barely groggy, then the sound of someone walking down stairs.

The fiancée turned back to Juno. “I'm going back to bed. Don't do anything stupid or I'll make you regret it. If Alessandra doesn't first.”

“Great, thanks,” he told her disappearing back.

Another woman, large and dark-skinned, appeared in the doorway after Juno had seated himself on the couch.

“Hello,” Juno began, only a little awkwardly. “You're the missing woman?”

“Not missing,” Strong replied, making her way carefully towards the armchair across from Juno. “Disappeared.”

“Hiding.”

“I fucking hate that word.” She grumbled. “But yes. I specifically did not want to be bothered by any more of you… people. If hiding is the only way to do that, well.”

“Well, Old-Archivist,” Juno leaned forward. “Can you tell me what was so scary about your old desk job that led you to fake your own disappearance? Was it the papercuts? The… lack of Wi-Fi?”

“How  _ long _ have you been an archival assistant?”

“Three weeks, why.”

“Got any weird visitors?”

“Ma'am, if they're visiting our basement willingly, they're weird.”

Strong sighed. “You have no idea how true that is. What's your name, again?”

“Juno Steel.”

“Well, Steel, what do you know about eldritch gods?”

*

Juno crossed his arms, staring at the ceiling. “Forgive me for finding this  _ difficult to believe.” _

“I'm aware.”

“You're saying, what, that I'm working for some giant eye god? That there are these  _ things _ out there that eat our goddamn fear?”

“Getting worked up over it won't change  _ anything.” _ Strong reminded him, not quite resigned, but something close.

“Do you have a  _ shred _ of proof for  _ any _ of this?”

“Try quitting your job.”

_ “What?” _

“Go on. Quit. The Eye won't let you.”

“Of course I can fucking quit if I want to! I can just go back into the office and… and…” Juno’s voice knotted in his throat, and his heart thrashed wildly in his ribcage.

“You can't.”

“No, goddamn it! I have to be able to—what the fucking—”

“Would you mind shutting up or quieting down?” Strong hissed. “My partner's trying to sleep.”

“How'd you do it, then? You used to be the Head Archivist. How the hell did you convince the Big Watcherman to let you go?”

“I blinded myself.” Silence, as Juno blinked at the shadowed woman across from him. “Come on, I know you noticed.”

“Well, I  _ figured _ you’d just tell me it’s none of my business.” He paused.  _ “Wait, _ you're telling me—”

“Believe me, I’d  _ love _ to say otherwise, but it very much is your business.” Alessandra replied. “Hydrochloric acid, right to the eyeballs. Hurt like nothing else I've ever felt before in my life.”

“And that freed you?”

“It severed my connection to the Eye. Bu-ut, just in case, I also went into hiding.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“You should consider it, if you want to get away from this life. Takes a lot of getting used to, but…”

“No-o thank you.” Juno said. “You're… very good at staying hidden. I was a detective, a while back. Couldn’t find a whisper of a sighting of you.”

Something flashed across Alessandra's face, like he'd hit a sore spot. “That's a problem of mine.”

“Not sure I follow.”

“I don't want to get into it now.” She rubbed at her forehead, at the premature wrinkles. “It's—okay, the thing is, when I blinded myself to get away from the Eye, I… formed a connection, with another one of the dread powers.”

“You  _ what?” _

“The position of Archivist is  _ different. _ You, or any other assistant, could blind yourselves and get away from the Institute, no problem, but…” Alessandra clenched her fists. “The Eye wouldn't have let me go that easily. I was… I was  _ part of it. _ The only sure way out would have been dying, and I was  _ not _ going to do that.”

“So you made a deal with the devil, huh?”

“Oh, don't be so dramatic, Steel. But, yes. I killed two birds with one beaker of hydrochloric acid, broke free of the Watcher and tied myself to Mister Pitch.” Alessandra blinked slowly. “The Dark keeps me hidden, and in exchange I do… tasks for it, on occasion. Cut power lines here and there. Being blind’s given me an advantage over other people, when we’re both in the dark.”

“Strong,” Juno began, “Why was your fiancée calling us monsters? I mean, me, personally, I like to think I’ve a couple years before I become physically painful to look at.”

Alessandra shook her head. “I—I’m not losing my humanity again. I’ll run errands, but I’m not becoming another _goddamn_ _avatar.”_

“You’re gonna have to rewind a little. Are we talking blue-cat-person Avatar or the bald kid?”

“Shut up, Steel,” Alessandra pinched the bridge of her nose. “Listen. You’re a human, at least for now. I’m what’s left of non-Archivist Alessandra Strong. I’ve no idea how far gone the new Archivist is, but it’s getting worse as we speak. I heard you came in with Dauphin. Well, you don’t need me to tell you he’s past the point of no return.”

“Is that what he had you call him? And watch it, without him I wouldn’t have found you in the first place.”

“And you’re not wondering what his motives are?” She yawned.

“Of  _ course  _ I am. I’m the most suspicious person on the damn planet, in both senses of the word. But that also brings me to—” he cut himself short, sitting bolt upright— “wait, what the  _ fuck _ are you saying about Rita?”

“And Rita is…?”

“Your—the new Archivist!”

“Unfortunate for her. But it’s three in the morning, and I left a journal behind at the Institute, which should help you explain all this to the rest of the Archives. Which you definitely should do.”

“No! What about—”

“Knowing what’s going to happen to her isn’t going to  _ help, _ Steel.” Alessandra got to her feet and hefted Juno up by the arm as well. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“Rita,” Juno twisted in her grip, as she led him forcefully to the door, “is my best  _ goddamn _ friend, and if something bad’s going to happen to her, I wanna know!”

“It’s not  _ her _ you should be worrying about,” Alessandra opened the front door. “Are there other assistants?”

“Well,  _ yeah, _ there’s a lot of unorganized files down there, thanks to you, and it’s more than a two person job—”

“Let me rephrase: are there  _ still _ other assistants?”

_ But we can’t quit. _ “What. Do you mean by that.”

“Your job has a higher mortality rate than any other in the country. World, probably.” She nudged Juno towards the open door. “Glad to talk to you, Steel. I mean it. But I’m planning on getting married under a fake name and I really don’t ever want to think about the Eye again. So, bye.”

“Wait-wait-wait-wait! I gotta fulfil my end of a deal.” Juno stopped, his heels teetering outside the threshold. “Ro—Dauphin wants to talk to you about, uh, Miasma! Yeah, that was her name. Fucking weird one, too, if you ask me.”

“Pay close attention to these four words, Steel, because I want you to remember them if you ever think of coming to me for help again: Not. My. Problem. Anymore. Tell him to talk to The Amazing Spider-Woman if it’s that serious. Now go, my journal’s underneath one of the floorboards in the old office. It’s loose.” Alessandra leaned against the door. “And… good luck. You’ll need it.”

Juno saluted. “Got a feeling I don’t wanna know. See you never, Strong, have fun at the wedding.”

“I will.”

*

Sasha Wire speed-walked down the street, fresh out of a late night at the Institute and looking forward to reuniting with her mattress and bed sheets, a solid five hours of sleep, six if she was lucky, before she got up at her usual hour, on the dot.

It was foggy, so foggy that Sasha could only see a couple of metres ahead of her, forcing her to slow her pace from “firm and time-efficient” to “moderate and precise” to avoid disaster. 

After only a minute or so of this, however, it began to rain.

Normally Sasha wouldn’t mind getting her hair wet, and her coat had a hood, but the rain was  _ unbelievably _ heavy. It came down in fist-sized pellets, near-drenching her from just a couple of droplets. It was beginning to come down even faster, and her range of vision shrunk down to maybe two or three feet in front of her.

After the pavement became more like a thin, fast-running stream, she resolved to just wait it out in a nearby doorway.

“Come here often?” A woman’s voice, full and neutral, came from her left. Sasha whipped around, hand reaching for her holster. “Oh, do be more careful, would you? Now I’m soaked.”

There was a woman in the doorway with her. Her clothes were nearly dry, despite everything, red hair and striking features dulled by the foggy evening. Sasha asked, “Wh—I would  _ ask _ you to find your own doorway.”

“Oh, it’s too late for that now,” the stranger fished a cigarette out of her pocket and just held it there, unlit between her fingers, for a moment. “Besides, I do believe I was here first.”

“You  _ do believe _ wrong, then.”

The woman raised an eyebrow, and didn’t answer. “Would you like one?” She asked instead, pulling out a box. Her fingers, nails painted red as her hair, obscured the brand name and identifying logo. “Tobacco taxes really are robbing us blind these days.”

Sasha hesitated. Smoking… she wasn’t  _ proud  _ that she had a love/hate relationship with it. Well. Crave/hate. She’d taken it up alongside Juno and Mick, back in Oldtown, because that was what you did when you were eleven and weren’t already on the hard stuff. She’d tried to kick it so many times, never letting her friends or, God forbid, colleagues, current employers, _ possible future employers _ catch a whiff of her struggle.

So yes, she hesitated.

But she was waterlogged and freezing to the marrow, hair plastered to her forehead, fingers shaking in spite of the lack of feeling. She’d always hated the cold.

Sasha reached over and took a cig from the box. “Thank you,”

“Oh, it’s no trouble at all, darling.” The woman pulled a lighter out from nowhere and lit the cigarette between her lips.

Sasha accepted the lighter, blue plastic, as it was offered to her. She lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, trapping the heat in her mouth, then lungs, sour and familiar. She felt herself relax, violent shivering tapering off into shallow trembling.

Warm.

Then she jolted back to herself, remembering she was in public, remembering she had to  _ be on guard, always. _ She nearly threw herself into the rain with how fast she spun to return the lighter—

—but she was alone.

The space in the doorway next to her was empty.

Sasha huffed a sigh. The woman had probably snuck off while Sasha was focused on the cigarette. No idea why, but people around here weren’t always in their right minds.

She tossed the barely-smoked cigarette,  _ better safe than sorry, _ in case it’d been laced with something off. She kept the lighter, though. The blue was nice.

*

“Mister Steel, not to be a Negative Nancy or anything, but are you absolutely one hundred  _ thousand  _ percent sure all this is, y’know,  _ true?” _ Rita frowned doubtfully down at the leather journal in Juno’s hands.

“I agree with Rita on this one,” Miss Wire said, standing next to Mister Mercury. “Juno, you said this woman burned her eyes out with  _ acid. _ She needs a therapist, not a false identity-wedding.”

“Sasha,” Mister Steel growled impatiently. “We literally  _ work _ in an institute designed to study the supernatural. Hell, you’re aiming for the top goddamn position! R— _ Glass _ has fingers as long as my forearm and manifested a door right over there—” he pointed to the file cabinet, now back in its rightful place— “and you think that’s, what? A shared hallucination?”

Mister Mercury frowned, and picked up the journal, flicking through it intently. Miss Wire said, “It’s  _ one  _ thing for something to be…  _ supernatural, _ as you called it. It’s something else entirely to believe in gods that feed on our fear. This woman is, to put it crudely,  _ crazy, _ Juno.”

“They’re not  _ gods—” _

The journal was thumped back down on the desk. “Hey Jay, did, uh, Missus Strong say anything about this monster thing?”

“I wasn’t  _ finished, _ Mick—”

“I mean, it’s just that I’m pretty sure I’ve heard about this in a statement or two, no big deal, y’know, but it seems kind of important—”

Mister Steel snatched the journal off the table. “‘The Not-Them,’” he read aloud. “‘is a shapeshifting creature, serving under the Entity known as The Stranger. It has the ability to alter memories of those who knew its victims, as well as digital photos—’ Jesus, Mick. You really picked a heavy one.” 

“Could, just—Jay, could you finish reading? I mean, is there anything else? Please?”

“... ‘It then replaces them, living a mostly normal life, until moving on to a new victim. For each victim shown, one person is immune to its reality-distorting effects; it seems to take a great deal of pleasure in tormenting these people.’” Mister Steel swallowed. “That’s…  _ really  _ fucked up.”

Rita sat up straight in her office chair, as Mister Mercury placed a hand on the desk to keep himself upright, looking sick. “M-Mister Mercury? You alright?”

There was a crease between his eyebrows, and Mister Mercury croaked, “Does, did Missus Strong say what happens to their victims? I mean, they—they should come back after the Not-Thing leaves, right?”

Mister Steel scanned the rest of the page, face scrunched. “No, but I doubt it, Mick. These things have about as much compassion for humanity as the city’s politicians. The statement-people probably would’ve mentioned if they came back, right?”

Mister Mercury’s mouth tightened. “But…”

Miss Wire put her hand on his shoulder. “Mick, you’re freaking yourself out. Come on, you need some air. This basement’s going to kill us.”

“Wait, just a sec, Miss Wire!” Rita interrupted. “I wana talk to Mister Mercury for a mo’, you guys go and take a long lunch or somethin’. We’ll catch up to you, ‘kay?”

The other two assistants exchanged a stiff glance, but nodded and obliged. The door creaked shut, leaving Rita and Mister Mercury alone.

“Miss Rita, I  _ swear _ I’m not crazy alright?” He burst out immediately. “But there’s been something wrong with Sasha’s sister, for a while, and I saw that monster and I just figured—”

“Of course you ain’t crazy, Mister Mercury!” Rita slapped her hand down onto the desk. “Miss Annie’s been, been taken by that thing, hasn’t she?”

Mister Mercury’s mouth hung open, eyes shining. “You remember her, too? That’s—oh, man, I thought I was the only one!”

Rita was not a gentle woman. She was nice to people, and she was cheerful, but gentleness didn’t come easy to her. Still, she made her words soft as she said, “No, Mister Mercury. I read a statement a couple weeks ago from that rich guy who’s friends with Mister Steel. He was on the  _ news  _ a while ago and—that part don’t matter. I-I heard what you’d been sayin’ about Miss Annie, and I figured it out from there.”

His shoulders slumped. “What do we do? I don’t want to have to, like,  _ kill _ her or anything. She still looks like a person, and to Sash and Jayjay, she looks like  _ Annie.” _

Rita placed her hand over his big one. He didn’t seem to mind the sticky, dusty residue on her fingers, which was a nice change of pace (from Mister Steel, and, though she didn’t say anything, Miss Wire). “I talked to ‘em—I mean, it—I mean them, before. I can try again! Maybe get ‘em to move on, or something. Then we can tell Miss Wire and Mister Steel what happened, ‘kay? It’ll be easier for all of us.”

Mister Mercury nodded, still distraught. “We should go catch up with the others. They’ll be real worried about where we are.”

“Great idea, Mister Mercury! I’ll grab my coat.”

*

Rita woke up in the middle of the night to rapping at her door.

She swung herself out of bed and hit the floor (ooh, cold, real real cold, she’d been  _ meaning _ to replace that pair of slippers she’d thrown out, but she hadn’t seen anything cute enough in the shops yet) walking.

“Comin’!” She called. “I  _ swear, _ Mister Steel, if you’re coming in here tellin’ me that you found some clue about a statement, I’ll ban you from coffee privileges for a month!”

She opened the door, and Cassandra Kanagawa shivered on the other side.

Miss Kanagawa was sweating, though that might just have been the funny lighting in the apartment complex hallway, and her eyes were glassy, and there was dirt caked under her nails, hair matted to her head.

“Heya, Archivist-Rita,” she croaked. There was a single black smudge-mark, curving from the apple of her cheek (though Rita wouldn’t call it an  _ apple _ with how skinny she was, a banana, maybe?) down to tuck itself underneath her jaw. “Can I take you up on that well offer?”

Rita nodded. “Of course, Miss Kanagawa. Aw, jeez, no offense, but if there ever was someone who needed a nap, it’d be you.”

Miss Kanagawa’s lips split into a serrated smile. “Don’t I know it.”

*

It became something regular, sorta. Miss Kanagawa wouldn’t always stop by beforehand to say hello, and she wasn’t  _ always _ the best company when she did, but Rita wouldn’t ever not be happy about having someone nearby she could chat to about her streams.

Even if sometimes that chatting involved shouting down a well and only hearing back her own echo. Without being  _ entirely _ sure that Miss Kanagawa was even down there.

Miss Kanagawa (“oh, call me Cass, you’ve definitely earned the right,”) Miss Cass never complained about it, though, so Rita was  _ pretty _ sure this was a win-win situation.

*

A sigh into the cloudy night. Both he and Juno have their backs to the earth below, facing the sky.

“The sky freaks me out sometimes,” Juno commented into the humid silence. “Like looking down at the fuck-off depths of the ocean, y’know? No one has any idea what the hell’s out there.” The stars reflected in Juno’s eyes, a hundred million flecks of light.

“I can’t say I relate,” was his reply, “though I do… understand what you mean. There’s far, far more space than there is ocean.”

“It’s nice when the stars are out,” the constellations were smothered by the city smog, and all the stars were caught between Juno’s eyelashes. “Less like looking at a goddamn void, I guess.”

“We’re looking at a void whether the stars are there or not, Juno. Do you know what space is?”

“Can it, Spaghetti,” Juno retorted, then sighed. “I… my brother and I used to look at the sky at night. He thought it was pretty, and I, I guess it was nice to feel small, for once. Like  _ al-ll _ your fuck-ups, all the shitty things you’ve done, it’s just swallowed up by how damn  _ big _ everything is.”

He didn’t respond, blinking at the sky.

“You… gonna say anything?”

“That was  _ extremely _ personal. I simply didn’t want to tread wrong.”

“Like you’ve ever cared about that before,”

He trapped  _ I never cared about  _ you _ before _ behind his teeth and instead said, “It’s truly a fate worse than damnation by the Entities, to face Juno Steel’s wrath,”

“Hey!”

They squabbled for a bit (though the word ‘squabble’ is crude and childish and he would  _ never _ apply it to himself), before settling into comfortable silence, continuing to watch the blank sky, for a change that wasn’t going to come.

He wondered if he should make a joke about  _ stargazing in Juno’s eyes. _ Rex Glass would have said it, perhaps even Monsieur Dauphin if he needed to resort to seduction (though  _ seductive _ is not a word one would generally apply to Dauphin). But he was not either of those names, right now.

_ What should I call you this time? _

Is what Juno asked every time they saw each other, and the answer varied.  _ Glass, Morales, Rose, Shah, Dauphin, Ransom. _ All answers he’d given at some point, all of them correct in the moment.

The truth was that the avatar of the Spiral did not have a name. It was falsehood incarnate,  _ it is not what it is not what it is not what it is. _ People saw it and were terrified of one of two outcomes; that it was real, or that they couldn’t trust their own minds anymore.

But he was not just the avatar of the Spiral, the Crooked One, the Throat of Lies, the affectionately-named ‘Twisty Man’. Because an avatar without a separate sense of personhood was weak, just another limb in the endless writhing mass of the entity they served.

He was a connection, a taut-string line between the Spiral and the physical world. Never to be one or the other, but an ambassador for both.

Each time, he came to Juno with a different name and a (slightly) different face, but was recognized. Juno accepted (with some grumbling and whining) his lack of stable personhood, lack of stable  _ everything. _

He’d heard the yelling about the Archivist, right before Alessandra Strong kicked Juno out of her house.

_ Rita is my best  _ goddamn  _ friend, and if something bad’s going to happen to her, I wanna know! _ Outrage, underlining his words, clear and red.

And he, outside, for  _ just one second, _ had felt it as well. That burning, chest-filling fury at the unfairness of it all, that there were people out there who had the ability to help but they just  _ wouldn’t. _ His fists clenched and he had begun fuzzing and flickering like a bad radio signal, his breath growing louder, static consuming all other sounds, the way it did when he got worked up over something. The way it almost never did, the way it  _ shouldn’t _ because he is Deceit and He Is Not What He Is and there wasn’t  _ really _ any room for large bursts of emotion, with a role like that.

But, Juno Steel. The lady was truly something else entirely, a scarred face and infectious outrage and a universe stuck between his eyelids.

He opened his mouth, teeth warping anxiously, and forced the words out.

“Peter Nureyev,” he turned his head to look at Juno. “A long, long time ago, I used to be someone named Peter Nureyev.”

*

A couple of days after Mister Steel’s proclamation about those Fear-Entity-God things (Rita believed him, and Mister Mercury did, too, probably, but Miss Wire still needed convincing) Rita told everyone she was working late that night, and not to wait for her, okay, you guys?

The others barely looked up from their computers (or, pen and paper in Mister Steel’s case) in acknowledgement.

That night, she  _ did _ stay late. She just didn’t work, because as much as she tolerated her job she was  _ not _ going to work overtime without pay, thanks. She watched the streams that she’d missed while taking statements, and waited for the clock to strike midnight.

Well, everyone would  _ probably  _ have been gone from the building by seven or eight, but she wanted to be absolutely and completely and totally sure, so she waited til midnight. It was way cooler and more dramatic like that, anyway.

Rita walked up the basement stairs, making a specific effort  _ not _ to tiptoe, because she wasn't some kind of  _ thief _ sneaking around her workplace. (Even if that would be kinda really really cool, like the double agent from  _ The Cold War… in Spaaaaace _ where she was actually revealed to be a  _ triple _ agent and—)

Pushing open the door to Artifacts Storage, she was met with darkness, except for the faint green glow of the haunted mask—that had killed Miss Cass's dad—along the wall to the left.

“Miss Annie?” Rita called, feeling as if her voice alone was kicking up well-forgotten dust. “Are you there? I wanna, well, I've been meaning to talk to you!”

“Hello, Archivist,” the voice came from just behind her ear, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

Rita wanted to jump until her head touched the ceiling, but decided that would be a bad idea. Instead, she squeaked and said, “I was just wondering, if, um—”

“Spit it out, please,”

“C-Can we talk somewhere else? I know this is your, like, house and all and no offense but it's  _ really _ creepy, Miss,”

“None taken. Do you have anywhere in mind? And not your office, the ceiling in there is rather… low.”

Rita risked a glance over her shoulder, and there, vague and distorted in the dark, Not-Annie towered over her, a wonky tree with scraggly limbs and soft hair that brushed against Rita’s cheeks. “There’s a diner down the street,” she offered, voice coming out weaker than it was meant to, “Miss Wire recommended it to me the other day, said the milkshakes were  _ delicious _ but you needed to add like a whole  _ mine _ of salt onto the fries, like they basically cut up raw potatoes and threw ‘em at her—so-o does that sound alright?”

Not-Annie breathed heavily into the silence, Rita fiddled with the sparkly buttons on her cardigan. “Fine by me,” was the hissed reply. Rita tugged her fleece tighter around her, and through the shadows that muzzied everything but silhouettes, she just… couldn’t shake the feeling that the Not-Them was smiling.

*

Juno stared at the criss-crossed lines of the map in front of him, multicoloured tacks shoved (a little messily; the paper had torn here and there) in areas where there’d been… a sighting.

Fucked up animals kept appearing in one specific region of the city. The all-encompassing term: fucked up. Greyhounds seen with necks twice as long as their body, a Sphinx cat with human hands and feet, a pigeon that screamed and moaned in a human’s voice. (Someone also mentioned a snake with four legs, but Juno was  _ pretty  _ sure they had just never seen a lizard before.)

The reports were most dense along one particular street, so Juno figured someone or something  _ there  _ was the one mutilating the poor bastards.

The clock said it was nearing one in the morning, but Juno hated sleeping while a case was still active and begging to be worked on. Fitful rest, weird dreams.

Instead, Juno pulled out a notebook, and began writing down the names of the businesses along the street.

He’d figure out how to use a search engine tomorrow morning.

*

“So, what about have you come to discuss with me?” Not-Annie looked down at their plate of undercooked fries with vague distaste. But, they probably also looked at every other human foodstuff in the same way, so Rita hoped no one working at the diner took it too personally. The place was nearly empty at this time of night, just two tired waiters and a cook that she could only  _ assume  _ existed, based on the presence of food.

“I… listen. I’m trying real hard not to sound mean here—even if you did kill my friend’s sister—but we really really think that it would be in everyone’s  _ best _ interest if you, Mx. Not-Them could, y’know, move on?” Rita waved a fry, dipped in her birthday cake-flavoured milkshake, through the air, accidentally flicking some sprinkles onto Not-Annie. “I mean, find someone else’s identity to steal?”

Not-Annie raised their eyebrows. They were mostly human looking right now, probably because they were in public, but some things were just a bit off. Their teeth were too white, nearly blue, and as they lay the back of their hand onto the table next to their plate, they had no palm lines or skin folds. Just one smooth membrane, stretching from their wrist to the tips of their fingers. “And what if I said I was  _ comfortable  _ here, and want to stay?”

“That don’t really make sense, though! There’s not a whole lotta fear for you to gobble up nowadays, is there? You work for that, um, Stranger God, don’tcha? Fear of what you don’t know. But Mister Mercury and I, we know you now. So we’re not scared-a you.”

“I don’t know what gave you the impression that Bartholomew isn’t  _ scared. _ He’s terrified, you know; of how he’ll tell the other Assistants about Annie Wire’s death, or that I will simply never leave and he will have to live with  _ me _ for the rest of his days. It’s a lose-lose situation, really. Bit pathetic.” The Not-Them smiled, and their teeth were too long and rectangular.

“Well, so what if Mister Mercury is scared? Of course he is! That poor man’s been living a freakin’ nightmare for the past I don’t even  _ know _ how many months and it’s all gonna, gonna  _ climax _ in the next few days!” Rita could feel a flush climbing her neck, but clenched her fists and forced herself to quiet down when the bell above the door jingled, and another customer entered. “But he’s not scared of what he don’t understand, so all that fear’s useless to you.”

The Not-Them regarded her with pale eyes. “You make a compelling argument, Archivist,” their voice was the whisper of dry leaves, “and I suppose you’re right. I’ll move on, and the Archives can go on with their… work.”

The Not-Them reached across the table, offering a handshake to seal the deal.

She should be relieved. She should be smiling and crying with joy right now. But instead, Rita could feel her heartbeat pounding everywhere in her body, her throat, her wrists, her stomach. The Not-Them’s fingers were sharp, and she couldn’t shake the impending sense of doom as she lifted her hand to clasp with theirs.

Right before their palms met, the Not-Them jerked, slicing their fingers right into the soft flesh of Rita’s wrist—

—Only that didn’t happen, because they missed by a hair’s breadth. So close that Rita felt the shallowest of scrapes across her skin, not even enough to break it.

“That’s enough out of  _ you,” _ an unfamiliar voice rasped.

Rita lifted her head, away from her hand, and the customer who had just entered a minute ago was holding a knife to the Not-Them’s throat over their shoulder.

The Not-Them sneered. “Archivist, I’m disappointed! You hired this  _ beast _ to attack me while I was distracted?”

Rita stuttered, “I-I didn’t, I don’t—”

At the same time, the woman snarled,  _ “Don’t _ call me that,”

“I can’t say I’m not surprised to see you, Huntress,” the Not-Them continued, uncaring of their protests. “You know, last I heard you were being kept on Rasbach’s leash,”

The woman’s eyes narrowed, and in one motion, drew the blade across their throat.

What came out was not blood, but something thin and white as milk, dribbling down from the perfect horizontal slit, coating the knife and the woman’s fingers.

The Not-Them did not choke, or moan, or cry. They howled, screeched,  _ screamed  _ in a thousand overlapping voices, deep, reedy, guttural. The lights whirred and the windows sagged and Rita covered her ears and shut her eyes and made herself small and waited for it to be over.

When it tapered off, everything was silent for a moment.

“You alive there, Archivist?” Rita opened her eyes and the woman was staring at her, still covered in that not-blood. But the space where the Not-Them had been was completely empty.

“Where did—who—what  _ was _ that?” Rita demanded.

The woman curled her lip in distaste. “I trapped that  _ thing _ where it can’t fuck with anybody anymore.”

“...You trapped it?!” Rita began racing through the implications behind  _ trapped. _ “Like did you send it to an alternate dimension or did you teleport it into prison or did you bind it to something or did you just make it  _ re-eal  _ small and put it in a jam jar or, or did you—”

The woman hopped into the seat opposite Rita’s, and skittered her knife across the stick table. “I trapped it inside that. Be careful with it,”

Rita blinked down at the dagger, still smudged with liquid. Its handle was wooden and hand-carved, featuring a woven sort of design where the lines snaked together to form abstract spirals and waves and whirls, almost like fingerprints. Rita reached out, trying to trace one line from start to finish, but found herself dizzy trying to keep track of it all.

“That’s enough,” the woman grunted, leaning forward and snatching the knife back, pocketing it. “We’re putting this thing in a safe and chucking it to the bottom of the ocean.”

“Thanks so much for saving me, Miss…?”

“Vespa.”

“That was real sweet of you! If you hadn’t come in just then, my wrist would-a been sliced to  _ ribbons.” _

Miss Vespa crossed her arms. “Don’t know what you were thinking was gonna happen, shaking hands with  _ that,” _ she spat, “but I don’t really care. C’mon, I’m walking you home.”

“That’s even  _ sweeter! _ But you really don’t have to, I’ll be fine on my—”

Miss Vespa fixed her a glare. “We need to talk to you tomorrow,  _ Archivist, _ and for that you have to be  _ alive.” _ She stood up abruptly, and locked her dark, jittery eyes onto Rita.

Rita picked up her bag and hopped to her feet as well. “Now just warning you, Miss Vespa, you’re like, super pretty and all, but right now I’m not really lookin’ for any—”

“Not. Interested.” Miss Vespa gritted out. She stalked towards the door, only pausing to make sure Rita was following.

Rita left a hefty tip on the table and shot an apologetic beam towards the counter that she was  _ pretty _ sure the staff were hiding behind.

(She wondered if any of them would come to the Institute to make a statement, and if so, that was gonna be awkward.)

*

“So-o, what didya think of the food in that place?” Rita struggled to keep up with Miss Vespa’s impatient strides. Miss Vespa wasn’t much taller than her, which was a welcome change, but Rita’s hot pink pencil skirt—cute as it was—was not made for moving quickly. “The fries could definitely use more salt, right? And they were that weird pale colour that happens when they need a  _ bit _ more time in the oven, we could have  _ waited—” _

Miss Vespa made a noise halfway between a snort and a sigh. “I don’t eat fries,”

“What did you order then? ‘Cause whatever it was, I’m guessing it was  _ just _ as underdone as my fries! Oh, Miss Vespa you should-a  _ seen _ ‘em, they were like greasy little snakes!”

“Water.”

“Wh—you’re telling me you went all the way to a diner at half past way too late at night just to order some  _ water? _ Do you not have runnin’ water at home? I know a couple-a places that sell bottled for real cheap, you shouldn’t have to go to a  _ diner _ to get your water, I bet it was overpriced anyway—”

Miss Vespa pinched the bridge of her nose. “I didn’t go to the diner for the  _ water, _ I came to find you—Archivist,” Rita had a feeling she was biting back a slightly more unsavoury word.

“Well, you could-a just come to the Institute to find me, my office’s in the basement. And I know some people don’t like basements, like really really don’t like them, so sometimes we gotta record statements up on the ground floor, so even if you don’t like basements, you could’ve asked!”

“Buddy had a  _ feeling _ that if you went into that diner with the shapeshifter, you wouldn’t be coming out. And I’d been meaning to try out the ritual knife,”

“Ooh,  _ Buddy! _ That’s a new name, who are they?”

“My partner.”

“Like, business partner, or like, partner in crime, or like, soulmate-partner? Oh! Oh! Is it all three?!”

“None of your business,”

“I’m  _ guessin’ _ that means either partner in crime or soulmate-partner. It’s okay, Miss Vespa, I’m no snitch. I was the youngest sibling, y’know!”

“We’re. Here.”

“Okay, the fact that you know where I live is a little unsettling, I won’t lie, and if I told Mister Steel that he’d  _ probably _ hunt you down and, um, ask you some  _ very _ confrontational questions, but don’t worry! I won’t tell him. You’ve been way too nice to me for me to do that to—”

“Night, Archivist.” Miss Vespa turned and started walking down the same footpath they’d just come from.

Rita called several goodnights at her back, and a couple more just in case Miss Vespa could still hear her, and then went inside, hoping the elevator to her floor was working. It was past two in the morning, and she’d had a super-duper eventful day.

Still, as she unlocked the door (there was dirt on the mat outside it, Miss Cass had probably come by earlier) and dropped her bag to flop right into bed, something bothered her.

When the two of them had walked through the city, the streetlamps had given an occasional splurge of orange light, revealing scars across Miss Vespa’s face and neck.

Normally Rita would politely ignore these, because scars were personal business and as friendly as she tried to be she really didn’t know Miss Vespa  _ that  _ well. But the shape and placement of these scars were just too, too  _ specific. _

The first scar, long, appeared from behind the top of her ear, dipping down to cross her cheekbone, nose bridge, other cheekbone, and then rising again to curl over the opposite ear.

The other one was simple, a shallow U-shaped curve along the soft, vulnerable top of her throat,  _ just _ below the corners of her jaw. A bow, a carved choker.

Both scars were shiny pink, almost dark on her sallow skin.

And the way they came together, the shape they formed… It felt too awful to even think, but…

(The flesh on the inside of her elbow began to itch.)

Miss Vespa had been muzzled.

*

Sasha Wire rolled over in bed, facing away from her nightstand, facing away from where her phone lay, screen dark.

She’d tried calling Annie earlier, about something so small she couldn’t even remember. There’d been no answer, but she hadn’t worried. Annie could be flaky sometimes.

When she called her again, two hours later, there’d still been no reply. Still, not a big deal.

But then—

The third time, (and by then it was well past midnight, but Annie’d always been a night owl) (or, looking back, was she? Sasha couldn’t remember Annie staying up late at any specific time, but she just  _ knew _ that Annie was, of course she was—) the ID said the number she was calling did not exist.

_ What? _

Sasha had gone to her call history, and all her attempts, where there’d previously been a missed call, were now registered at attempting to contact a nonexistent number.

There was probably a reasonable explanation. Maybe Annie had switched phone numbers (in the middle of the night, why in the middle of the night?) without telling her. Sasha would go into work tomorrow, early if she was restless enough, and ask Annie about it. Perks of sharing a workplace with your sibling.

No use panicking. Everything would be fine.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You realize what you’re saying is ridiculous, right?” Miss Wire’s voice was higher than usual. Not hysterical, because honestly Rita couldn’t imagine Miss Wire as ‘hysterical’ if a meteor was about to wipe out all life on the planet, but strained.
> 
> “I’m afraid everything the Archivist just said is entirely true. I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Wire.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Warnings:** Mentions of minor character death, mentions of stalking, smoking, hair-pulling as a form of self-harm, swearing, blood, animal mutilation, non-consensual body alterations, body horror, entomophobia, attempted forced double-suicide, creepy exes, fire, burning, small animal attacks, bombs, ommetaphobia, trauma, depression, falling great heights, feeling detached from your own voice, mild arachnophobia warning, paranoia, discussion of eye trauma, drugs (no drug usage), obsession, visual and auditory hallucinations (Vespa), gun & knife violence, gore, emetophobia, discussion of mass-death due to starvation, tentacles (non-sexual), mentions of dehumanization (muzzling), self-destructive tendencies, bordering on suicidal (Juno-typical).
> 
> The scene with self harm is short and not integral to the plot, so if you are sensitive to that sort of thing, I'd recommend just skipping the entire scene. It starts at the first asterisk after <“Can I read that section about the shifter thing again?” Mister Steel croaked.> and ends at the next asterisk after that one.

Rita walked into her office the next morning to see a woman sitting at her desk.

“Hello, Archivist,” the woman was just barely familiar, like when you’re watching a stream and you see an actor you  _ know _ has cameoed in at least one other stream you’ve watched and you care enough to be bugged about it but not enough to actually look it up. Like that. “It’s lovely to meet you formally.”

“Well, I don’t really know who you are, but I’m sure it’s lovely to meet you too, Miss, um, what’s your name?”

“Buddy Aurinko. Buddy, if you'd like.” Almost half of Miss Buddy’s face was hidden behind her hair, which was so bright red and  _ beautiful! _ In the front, strands escaped the main mass of hair here and there, curling inwards, towards what of her face wasn’t hidden. Two tips of such misbehaving strands brushed either corner of Miss Buddy’s mouth.

(Though, even these lengths were so neat and perfectly in place, maybe it was an intentional design choice? As much as Rita loved magazines, she didn’t always keep up with the current fashion trends.)

_ “Oh-h, _ you’re Miss Vespa’s Buddy! Where is she? You nabbed yourself a real sweetheart, Miss Buddy, I’m telling you, she rescued me from the shapeshifting thing and then even insisted on walking me  _ home! _ But she also said that saving me was quote—” Rita made her voice all serious— “‘Buddy’s idea’ so I guess you’re included under the ‘sweetheart’ umbrella too!”

A smile, small, pulled at Miss Buddy’s lips. “You’re too kind, darling. And to answer your question, my Vespa was right by the door when you came in.”

“Wha—but—I didn’t see her!”

“Yes, that is her specialty, I’m afraid. Well, afraid for you. It’s rather a boon for us, I’d say.”

“Well I’d love to take you up on that offer of a conversation, I  _ love  _ a good chat, but—” Rita’s face, heart, stomach, everything fell when she remembered what she’d been dreading since she opened her eyes this morning, still in last night’s clothes— “but I have something  _ really important _ I gotta do today, and, um, it’s not going to be a good experience for anyone.”

Miss Buddy raised an eyebrow. Perfectly, even, without so much as twitching the other side of her face. Rita had always wanted to be able to do that! “Oh? Do elaborate, please, as I’d say our discussion today is  _ also _ very important.”

“That, uh, thing Miss Vespa killed last night, the Not-Them, shapeshifter, person, monster, thing. It was wearing—pretending to—one of my assistants thinks it was her sister, so I  _ really really really _ need to tell her what happened. Like, today. Now.”

“I see. That’s a rather delicate situation you have there. I’d be more than happy to—”

“Rita!” The door to her office burst open, and Mister Steel was standing there, clutching a file and gasping to himself. “Rita, I found—listen, you gotta—you’re not Rita.”

He narrowed his eyes at Buddy, who had a pistol in her hands. Not aimed at him, just holding it. Rita hadn’t even noticed her pull it out. His hand was at his holster, and oh  _ jeez  _ things were gonna get ugly if she didn’t speak up.

“I’m right here, Mister Steel,” she said, from her position off to the side. “And, listen, I’m sure what you have is real groundbreaking and all, and I  _ swear _ I’ll hear all about it later, but ri-ight now there are some, um, slightly more urgent talks we need-a have.”

“What do you mean by  _ urgent?” _ Mister Steel shoved the papers in his hands onto a side table (okay, it was really an old chair, but she’d been throwing junk onto it for so long that it barely resembled one anymore). “What’s going on, Rita? And who the hell’s this? Do you… does this have to do with Annie Wire?”

Rita squeaked, and Mister Steel narrowed his eyes. “Why would it be about Miss Annie?”

“Hard not to notice Sasha’s basically been a wreck since she came in this morning. Been chain-smoking harder than a sewer rabbit.”

Miss Buddy grimaced. “You were right, Archivist. This is certainly going to be a…  _ nasty _ ordeal.”

In a moment, Mister Steel shoved away one side of his coat and grabbed his blaster.  _ “What _ did you just say?”

“I said, ‘This is going to be a nasty ordeal,’” Miss Buddy was utterly calm as Mister Steel aimed the blaster at her. “I’m going to be honest, I don’t see why that statement was worthy cause to make threats to my person.”

“That’s not what I meant. You called Rita  _ Archivist, _ just then.” Mister Steel tightened his grip. “You’re one of those freaking… avatars, aren’t you.”

“You’re one to talk,” Miss Buddy replied. “You may not be a fully-realized avatar—Steel, is that what she called you?—but you’re certainly affiliated. With more than one, even.”

“What the goddamn hell are you—”

Rita broke in, “Guys, these big reveals are life-changing and all, but we  _ really really _ have to bring Miss Wire in here. And Mister Mercury, too, if he feels like it.”

Mister Steel’s brow didn’t unscrunch, but he retreated back out the opposite door, not turning his back on them.

Once the door fell shut, Miss Buddy continued, “As I was saying, darling, I’d be more than happy to back up your tale as you tell your assistants. I don’t imagine the sister will take it well, and I make a habit of always having reinforcements, in one way or another.”

Rita hesitated. Would it be better to have Miss Buddy on her side? On one hand, this was a super personal conversation, and none of them would probably do too well with a stranger there, watching them (with that dark, dark eye), least of all an avatar. On the other, Miss Wire was already sceptical of a lot of supernatural things, so Rita  _ really really _ needed someone to side with her on this.

“Just warnin’ you, Miss Buddy, Miss Wire and Mister Steel aren’t gonna be super nice. Like, really super un-nice.”

“I’d say I have a very thick skin, Archivist. Worry a bit more about yourself.”

*

“You realize what you’re saying is ridiculous, right?” Miss Wire’s voice was higher than usual. Not hysterical, because honestly Rita couldn’t imagine Miss Wire as ‘hysterical’ if a meteor was about to wipe out all life on the planet, but strained.

“I’m afraid everything the Archivist just said is entirely true. I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Wire.”

“I’d politely ask that you stay _out_ of this.” Miss Wire told Miss Buddy. “You’re trying to tell me that Annie was, _replaced?_ This isn’t some fairy-tale story, Rita, I know what my sister looks like. I know what my sister _acts_ like.”

Miss Buddy said, “I don’t think you do.”

Miss Wire closed her eyes and took exactly three deep breaths. “As I have already said, Miss Aurinko, I  _ don’t _ think this is any of your concern.”

“What the hell makes you guys think Annie isn’t…  _ Annie, _ then?” Mister Steel crossed his arms.

Rita slid Missus Strong’s journal across her desk (where Miss Buddy had finally given up her seat behind it), open on the Not-Them’s page.

“Is  _ that _ what this is?” Miss Wire somehow managed to sound even more incredulous. “You read a spooky story and got it in your head that it’s happening to you, too?”

“Miss Wire, I watched her, them, it, the thing die. Miss Vespa—” the woman in question fixated her eyes on Rita from the office’s shadowy corner— “sliced their throat like  _ krrt, _ and I can absolutely  _ assure  _ you, they weren’t human.”

Miss Wire’s knuckles were white around the armrests of the statement-giver’s chair. “So my sister’s dead,” she gritted, “and you’re all  _ nuts.” _

“Sasha, listen.” Mister Mercury pulled out a folded picture from his back pocket. “I was cleaning out my storage room the other day, y’know, looking for antiques to sell door-to-door, and I—”

“Spit it  _ out, _ Mick.”

“I… found this old photo of us.” Mick’s voice was loud in the silent office, placing the picture onto Rita’s desk. “Back when there were five of us.”

Squeezed together, into the frame of the dusty polaroid, were five faces. Three of them Rita knew, one was vaguely familiar (because Mister Steel and the late other Mister Steel really were identical twins, even if  _ her _ Mister Steel was more beat up even back then), and one she didn’t recognize at all.

Presumably, the real Annie Wire.

(Dark-haired and hook-nosed and a  _ picture _ of her older sister.)

Mister Steel made a choke-gasp-gag noise in the background. Miss Wire snatched the photo off the desk.

“This is sick,” she snapped, standing up. (Even filled with white-hot emotion, she was poised, back ramrod-straight. Or maybe  _ because _ she was so emotional?) “How you’ve convinced yourselves of this, this  _ conspiracy theory, _ I don’t know and I don’t  _ care. _ I have a funeral to plan.”

With that, she whirled stiffly out the door.

*

“Can I read that section about the shifter thing again?” Mister Steel croaked.

*

Only once she was in her apartment, with the front door locked, in her bathroom, with the bathroom door locked, did Sasha crack.

She thumped her back against the tiled wall, slid down it until she was sitting. The floor was cold and the wall was cold and her teeth clicked as they shuddered together.

She buried her hands in her hair, and pulled, and pulled, until the shaking stopped.

The polaroid remained carefully folded in the depths of her jacket pocket. Sasha remained dry-eyed.

The cold ached.

*

A door that wasn’t supposed to be there swung open into Rita’s office. “Ah, hello, Archivist, I’ve been meaning to talk to y—”

“Do I look like the Archivist to you?” Miss Buddy asked, leaning against Rita’s desk.

“Mm, perhaps not.” Mister Glass leaned around Miss Buddy in a way that made it look more like the office was bending around  _ him, _ but that was being pedantic. “Hello, Archivist. And Juno, too! And Vespa, and Mercury, my, isn’t  _ this _ turning out to be a party—”

“Uh, no offence, Mister Glass, it’s lovely seeing you and all even if you do keep making the lights flicker for some reason, but this is like, a  _ really _ bad time.”

“On the contrary, darling, this is an  _ excellent _ time for, what should I call you…?”

“Peter Ransom, if you will.”

“For Peter here to show up.” Miss Buddy sighed. “You’re here about the Miasma situation, I believe?”

“Ah, so you chose to listen to me, after all,”

“If you would forgive me for doubting the self-proclaimed ‘Throat of Lies’,” Miss Buddy paused. “But! Arguing is unbecoming of us. My apologies for being… distrustful of you.”

“And mine for referring to you as a, quote, ‘fly-eating fool wearing a person’s face’.”

“You  _ what?!” _

“Vespa, dear, I appreciate your concern, but it’s in the past now. Moving on,” Miss Buddy turned to the other three, Mister Mercury (who was watching with wide eyes), Rita (who hadn’t seen banter  _ this _ interesting since  _ Companions and Confidants 7: Return of the Associates) _ and Mister Steel (who was really really  _ worryingly _ quiet, barely having glanced up from the journal page, scanning it over and over, probably blaming himself for not noticing about Annie earlier, which was  _ stupid _ ‘cause there was literally no way he could have known—). “I recognize that this is a very volatile situation. Even so, we cannot wait any longer to address the issue at hand.”

“The  _ issue at hand _ is that Sasha’s sister was fucking  _ replaced, _ and it’s already been dealt with. Forcefully.” Mister Steel growled, a little hoarse.

“It certainly  _ was _ the issue at hand, darling, until it was, as you said, ‘dealt with forcefully’. Since it has been dealt with, another issue takes centre stage. That’s how priorities work.”

“Now  _ hang on _ a second—”

Miss Buddy curled the corner of her mouth. “Believe me, Juno, if I could give you all time to grieve, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, we are running out of seconds to hang on to.”

“Dammit, will you people let me finish?!”

“I’m with Jay on this one,” Mister Mercury piped up. “I mean, if it’s  _ that _ important, I think Sash should probably be here. I don’t wanna be the one skinned alive after she finds out we didn’t tell her something. Again.”

“Mister… Mercury, was it?” Miss Buddy began, “Miss Sasha Wire just received some  _ very _ heavy news. Life changing, even. I can tell you now that she’s going to be out of commission for a  _ while.” _

“I can tell  _ you _ now that you don’t know anything about Sasha, if you think like that.” Mister Steel retorted. “Hell, she’s probably got the funeral already planned, and will be coming into work tomorrow, if not later today.”

“We can tell her about it  _ later, _ then,” Miss Buddy paused. “Does everyone here know about the fourteen dread powers?”

Mister Ransom made a noise of affirmation, Mister Steel grumbled something unintelligible, Mister Mercury went “Oh, yeah, definitely,” and Rita replied, loud and clear, “Yes, Miss Buddy!”

“And how many of you are aware of the fifteenth entity?”

“What?” Mister Steel asked. “No. Strong said there were only fourteen. What, do these things breed? Go at it up in space like rabbits?”

“I’d thank you not to be crass, Juno,” Miss Buddy replied, turning to Rita and Mister Mercury. “I take it you two don’t know about the Extinction, either, then.”

“Uh, no, Miss Buddy, but it sounds real bad.” Rita scratched at the inside of her elbow.

“And you would be right in thinking that,” Mister Ransom said. “We have reason to believe that there is a fifteenth dread power…  _ emerging, _ if you will. The name is quite self-explanatory. Fear of the world’s end, that there will be no more after us. And it certainly doesn’t benefit anyone here.”

Vespa snorted. “That’s an understatement.”

“So how does Gunk or whatever her name is fit into all this?” Mister Steel shoved the journal back onto Rita’s desk.

“Miasma, darling. Self-proclaimed avatar of the Extinction.” Miss Buddy said, distaste crossing her face. “Worse, we have reason to believe that she’s planning something.”

Mister Ransom continued, “Before his,  _ timely, _ I should say, death, Miasma was working with Brock Engstrom to do… something.”

Rita stared at him blankly.

“Brock Engstrom? A criminal so utterly mediocre that he had to rely on the power of an  _ eldritch god _ to be successful?”

“Sorry Ransom, Peter, sir, not ringing any bells for me,” Mister Mercury said, and Mister Steel made a noise of agreement.

Miss Buddy waved a hand dismissively. “His, admittedly pathetic, career as a thief isn’t relevant. What you need to know is that he was an avatar of the Dark, and on more than one occasion, was seen…  _ fraternizing _ with Miasma.”

“Uh huh.” Mister Steel said. “What’s the big deal? We’re  _ fraternizing _ right now, aren’t we?”

“That we are, detective.”

“Our only issue with the allyship itself is how completely  _ strange _ it is. The Dark is one of the oldest fears,  _ well _ before civilization itself, well before humanity came to be, even. And to be aligning itself with a power so new it hasn’t even fully emerged yet, you can hardly blame us for being suspicious.”

“Got a feeling there’s an  _ ‘and’ _ coming after that.”

_ “And, _ shortly after Engstrom scared the living daylights out of an Imperium Hotel bellboy by being found butchered in a pool of his own blood, Miasma began working with military weapons designers. Specifically, those who specialize in bombs.”

Rita gasped so hard her voice cracked, and Mister Mercury nearly fell over.

Mister Steel clicked his tongue against his teeth. “That’s… not good.”

Mister Ransom rumbled something distorted that might have been an, “Indeed.”

“Using my own methods of gathering information—”

Rita’s second gasp cut Miss Buddy off, which she knew was rude and kind of felt bad about but she had to ask before the subject changed; “Oh! Oh! Did you follow her around like you did with me?!”

(Because  _ that _ was where she’d seen Miss Buddy before! Not as a cameo on her streams, but as the beautiful lady across the street who smiled at her. Aw-w, Miss Buddy was so lovely.)

“She  _ what?” _ Mister Steel snapped.

Miss Buddy didn’t flinch. “I’d prefer the phrase ‘keeping an eye on you,’ given the less stalkerish implications, but yes, I did tail Miasma to locate her suppliers. I’ve no reservations about that.”

Mister Mercury was watching the back-and-forth with wide eyes. “Oh man, Rita, this is like something out of your streams!”

Mister Steel nudged (well… kicked) Mister Mercury’s ankle with his own. “Not the time, Mick,”

“Ow! Jayjay, c’mon!”

Miss Buddy tapped her fingers on Rita’s desk. “If you two are quite finished squabbling like schoolboys, I’d like to tell you about the plan.”

*

Juno went back to his apartment that day to step on a pile of mail on his inside mat.

Most of it was the usual crap; bills, junk mail, threats from the enemies made in his cop days that were  _ probably _ just bravado, and… a postcard.

_ Greetings from Ebris Falls! _ was sprawled across the front in bright-coloured font.

Flipping it over revealed messy, unfamiliar handwriting that said,  _ Wedding went off without a hitch. Hope things are well on your end, Steel. _

There was no signature, just a lopsided doodle of a closed eye.

Juno’s mouth twitched. Things were definitely not ‘well’ for his part, what with Miasma and Sasha and  _ Annie-Annie-Annie, _ a scrap of good news was refreshing.

There wasn’t a return address, but that was no surprise. He hoped Alessandra and her wife had the time of their lives blowing fuses and unscrewing light bulbs. They deserved it.

*

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and Rita was  _ bored. _

She knew she had work to do. There were statements to sort, statements to record, yadda yadda yadda, but they’d all been so boring lately. Just shadows under streetlamps and voices under their beds and  _ bleh. _ No one had even divulged any good family drama since that Slaughter statement where all those rich people killed each other over an inheritance!

Everything was meh right now, since the weapons designer they were gonna interrogate didn’t go anywhere on a regular basis except for on Thursdays, two entire days away.

She watched her streams for a bit, but it lost a lot of thrill since no one was there to either watch it with her or walk in and berate her for not doing her job, which was half the fun.

Mister Steel was out on field work, again, (at this point he probably just couldn’t stand doing paperwork for a second longer than strictly necessary) and Mister Mercury was looking for something in Artifacts Storage.

(Rita pretended not to know that he had just opened an online shop selling “REAL SUPERNATURAL ITEMS!!!”

What’s the harm? It’s not like the Institute was using them, they were just getting dusty in a back room.)

Rita eyed the overflowing chair. She knew she shouldn’t, knew Mister Steel would _kill_ her for going out and doing field work on her own. He probably wanted to do this case on _his_ own, even.

She pulled at the corner of the case file Mister Steel had thrown onto the chair the day before. It was the one about the poor messed up animals, and  _ jeez _ now she was tearing up just thinking about them! 

Rita sniffled and pushed up her glasses to read the other piece of paper that Mister Steel had attached to the file.

It was a map of a street in the city. One building, represented by a little grey square, was circled in pink highlighter. The post-it note stuck to the map read an address and the opening times for… a pet groomer.

Well, either Mister Steel had a little kitty cat he hadn’t told her about (in which case she was gonna  _ kill _ him and then steal his little kitty cat), or…

This was the guy who was torturing the animals!

Oh no, she couldn’t let them hurt the poor babies even a second longer. If she did, she’d never sleep again, and  _ oh-h _ what if the animals she’d failed to save crawl through her vents at night to torment her for eternity like in  _ Monster Pets 5: The Hounds of Hell _ ?!

That settled it. Rita grabbed her bag and marched out of the office to catch the next bus into the city centre.

With all her weird nightmares of dirt and moths and stars and masks, she couldn’t afford to lose  _ another _ wink of sleep.

*

Oka-ay, he wasn’t supposed to be here.

The map Juno had taken from the archives (after his other one had gone missing) (he felt like he’d forgotten something) was old and ridiculously outdated, not to mention detailed to the point where it was mostly black writing, with the words parting to reveal the occasional street amongst the mess. There was a stain blotched along the bottom left corner that smelled suspiciously like Rita’s weird fruity tea phase.

So, yeah, Juno was pretty sure this shitty city park wasn’t the local animal control building he was meant to be at.

(He  _ should’ve  _ been going to pest control, but apparently the ants he was after were “as big as tarantulas” and “vicious” and lo and behold, animal control was brought in.)

Juno kicked idly at an empty soda bottle. Was he desperate enough to pull out his comms and try figuring out how a GPS system works?

Mm. No.

He flipped the map upside down as he ambled through the park, as if it were an optical illusion that would reveal itself to him if he only squinted at the right angle.

“Gonna find my old map when I get back, I  _ swear,” _ he mumbled to himself, tripping lightly over a rock, then whipping his head up to make sure no one saw that.

Something dazzled at the corner of his vision. He was seeing things, right? He was on edge and tired and lost and losing his damn mind.

But nope. After he shook his head and rubbed his eyes, she was still there.

Ingrid Lake, glowing on a crooked park bench.

“Lake?”

The woman in question didn’t respond for a moment. She just gazed upwards, at the muggy sky, eyelids fluttering as if she were bathing in the sun. “Juno Steel,” she said, soft as styrofoam, still not looking his way, “What a surprise to meet you again.”

“Last time I saw you you were serving twenty. Two months ago. You were starting a life sentence two months ago.” He’d worked a job for Vicky, on a favour (because he was a young dumbass in the past and got himself into debt with VVVV, which anyone at all could tell you was bad news. Good thing he was older now, used his extensive experience to make new, different bad decisions) to take down the obsessive ex who’d been trying for a double suicide, what, fifteen years now? Boom, saved the day, got her arrested, with the added bonus of having Captain Khan work as his sidekick.

All that effort and she was just. Here.

“Oh, I definitely should be,” she swivelled her eyes around to stare at him, white-blue. “But it’s no easy task, keeping a dead woman in prison. I feel bad for the poor darlings, they really did their best.”

“Keeping a… Jesus. You look pretty fresh for someone who should’ve been in the ground fifteen years ago.”

“Mm, not the ground, no. It’s far more lovely up in space, don’t you think? All that vast, vast  _ space.” _

“Eh. I mean, I wanted to have my own spaceship when I was like, four. It’s one of the very few things I actually grew out of.” Juno shrugged, still keeping his distance.

“I don’t think horror and awe of the void is something anyone grows out of,” Lake said, then tinkled a champagne-glass laugh. “But you would know that better than anyone, wouldn’t you, O Freefalling One?”

“I don’t see what Tom Petty has to do with any of this,”

“Aw, you really are impossible to conversate with, aren’t you?”

“No fear of death, lady. You know, stare into the Great Nothingness and laugh and all that,”

“Oh, but the End doesn’t have to mean death, detective,” her pale hair lay limp across her shoulders, perfectly still, ashen in the clouded sunlight. “Certainly, it  _ almost  _ always means the end of a life. But humans are finicky, and paranoid, and  _ so fretful. _ We fear the end of a relationship, of our youth, of an opportunity, of a door closing we cannot reopen. Everyone fears the end of something.”

“Oka-ay…” Juno scratched the back of his head. “Sure. Why not.”

“Now, did you need me for something, Steel?”

“Um. Can you point me in the direction of animal control?”

*

Rita curled her hands around the cold mug, and with her foot traced a tear in the fabric of the chair she sat in.

Mister—No,  _ Dr. _ Monrovian (the little chipped desk-plate read NPhD, after all) had hustled her inside with all the strength in his creaky old body, which worried Rita a bit because she swore she could actually  _ hear _ his joints scraping together as he planted a mugful of over-stewed tea into her hands.

Rita took a sip, and gagged. Good thing Dr. Monrovian wasn’t around to hear, because even if she knew he was evil, it was still difficult to be rude to him when he was being so… hospitable?

Just—she had so much trouble picturing  _ him _ hurting the animals. He more resembled a half-drowned baby sewer rabbit than a mask-wearing serial torturer.

Dr. Monrovian himself re-entered the room at last, hefting with him a small pet carrier using both hands.

“Ah, New-Archivist!” He panted, setting down the carrier. “Good to see you again!”

“Uh… you too, Mi—Dr. Monrovian! Hope you had a good time in those few minutes we were apart,” Rita gingerly set her tongue-numbingly bitter tea onto his desk. “Now, listen, there’s something I gotta talk to you about.”

“Well, whatever about? Oh, I hope this isn’t about the animals again. I’ve told you already, Archivist, I couldn’t stop that even if I wanted to!” He slid into the seat behind the desk, opposite hers.

Rita frowned. “No, Doc, you ain’t never said anything like that to me before,”

Dr. Monrovian waved a rucked hand dismissively. “Oh, well, I said it to  _ one _ of you Archivists, can’t keep track of them all. Or it might have been one of those assistants, actually, they come and go so quickly…”

“Aw, jeez, Dr. Monrovian, who's making you mangle these animals?”

“Who but the Flesh, my dear? Viscera, the Pulsing Meat, whatever it is you young people call it these days. It calls for me to perform its ghastly deeds, and it’s been a long few years since I’ve had the words to disagree.”

“But there’s a way you can stop, right?” Rita’s fingers shook as she hugged her bag to her stomach. “You gotta have some kinda choice in all this!”

“I did have a choice, and then I made it. And now there isn’t a choice anymore.”

“I—I…”

“Oh dear, you seem distressed.” Dr. Monrovian bent down to open up a desk drawer in a jumble of elbows and sweater vest. “Have a biscuit, and as you eat, I will tell you many interesting animal facts!”

“I… Ooh, biscuits—?” A memory sprang to mind, of Miss Wire and Mister Steel warning her (on separate occasions) about accepting food from potential enemies. Dr. Monrovian didn’t seem to be her enemy, but… “That’s real sweet, Doc, but I shouldn’t.”

“It’s no problem,” it certainly did look like a problem, as he pulled out a packet of biscuits. They were the real boring kind, where you chipped your teeth if you bit down suddenly and your tongue would be dry as a sand dune after you’ve finished. He opened the packet. “Go on, take one.”

Feeling like a chastised grandchild, Rita reached over and nibbled on one. At least the packaging was sealed beforehand, right? Oh, she was gonna have to drink  _ so _ much berry tea after this to moisturize her mouth.

“And now, on with the animal facts.” He cleared his throat. “The cave swiftlet is a type of Indonesian bird that constructs its nests partially out of its own saliva.”

Saliva was becoming an entirely theoretical concept to her as she finished off a quarter of the rectangular biscuit.

“Sloths can swim up to four times faster than they move on land, and their preferred method is the breast-stroke.”

“I never learned how to swim until a couple years ago,” she told him through a mouthful of crumbs. Half the biscuit down, another half to go. “Mister Steel was always goin’ on about it,  _ ‘Oh Rita what if you fall into a river and drown because you can’t swim? I have no sense of romance or theatrics and won’t let you have a dramatic moment with your future love interest where you fall into a lake and they have to dive in after you and pull you to shore and perform mouth-to-mouth.’ _ So I had to take swimming lessons.”

Dr. Monrovian seemed unperturbed, continuing on. “Humans are the only species that cry because of heightened emotions, rather than optical irritation.” He paused, contemplating something. “Or… well, sometimes when I’m performing a particularly painful remaking, I look into that creature’s face, and I think they wish they could cry.”

Um!

What!

Rita muffled whatever noise she was going to make by shoving the rest of the biscuit into her mouth. “It’sh been nice talkin’ to you, Doc,” she swallowed painfully, feeling the half-chewed bits stab her as they went down, “but I really gotta go now, okay, bye!”

Bag in her lap, she was planning on a tactical retreat. (She wouldn’t let the animals just keep suffering, she’d bring in reinforcements after the whole Miasma thing was over. Someone good at talking to people,  _ real _ good, like, like Miss Buddy!)

Dr. Monrovian stood up from his seat along with her.

“Oh, must you leave so suddenly, New-Archivist?”

“Yeah! I! Um!” Rita shoved a hand into her pocket and pressed the teeny tiny button she’d installed on her comms. They began to ring in a faux-phone call. “Oh, jeez, would you look at that!”

“Do you need to answer that?” Dr. Monrovian shuffled around his desk.

“Nah, it’s just my, um, doctor! Calling to tell me… about my health. I’ll call ‘im back later, don’t you worry about it.”

The crinkles on Dr. M’s forehead grew deeper. “Archivist, before you go, I have a gift for you. As a token of our… alliance.”

“A  _ present?!” _ Immediately, she pushed her concerns to the back of her mind. “Oh, Doc, you shouldn’t have! For little old me-e?”

“Just a trifle, really.” He gestured to the pet carrier by the door, and something thumped within it. “Though it’s recommended that you don’t open it until you get back somewhere safe.”

“Oh, Dr. Monrovian, I swear on my  _ life  _ I’ll take great care of whatever’s in there!”

Rita tripped over herself to crouch down and try seeing through the little front-window. Curse the horrid overhead lighting!

She hefted up the carrier with one hand, and swung her bag over her shoulder. “Try to hurt as few critters as possible while I’m gone, m’kay?”

“As few as possible… well, perhaps I could do that.” He mumbled. “Do come back, New-Archivist!”

“You can count on me, Doc!”

*

The Archives were empty.

It was late afternoon, and Sasha had finally showed up to work.

_ (“Think of this as a test, my dear. If you can last down there long enough, I will be more than happy to have you take my place, overseeing everything.”) _

That old bastard. He wanted her to show him she could survive the Archives? She was gonna more than  _ survive. _

She’d straighten this whole place out. Make it somewhere safer, protected, strong, where the ugly creatures that called themselves avatars couldn’t worm their way in.

Starting with fixing the heating, because  _ god, _ her knuckles were sticking together and her breath was nearly visible.

Sasha stuck her hands into her pockets, huddled behind in her desk chair, and she hated wearing coats indoors because it gave a bad impression to the higher ups but she’d also  _ really _ rather avoid getting sick.

Her hands brushed against the thin edge of a polaroid photograph.

Something churned, chilly and violent, in her stomach, a nausea riptide. She clenched her jaw so her teeth didn’t chatter, wished she’d brought a thicker coat.

She jerked her hands out of her pocket, and something spilled out with them, clattering to the floor.

For a heart-stopping second, Sasha was sure it was the photo (and she’d have to pick it up and  _ look _ at it and she worried she might never put it down again) but the sound it made was too solid, too plasticky.

Lying on the ground by her boots was the blue lighter Aurinko had given her, that evening in the rain.

She… didn’t want to pick it up. She wanted to kick it away, let it skitter under some file cabinet to be forgotten about. Hopefully the weird one that hasn’t been quite right since Juno’s… boyfriend(…?) vanished it and then brought it back.

Not like she’s not used to dodging her problems with force.

But… however much she didn’t trust Aurinko, this was her workplace, and she wouldn’t inflict on it whatever this lighter brought.

Bending down in her desk chair, she picked it up. It was smaller than it had seemed in her pocket, and sat easily against the pad of her thumb.

She flicked it on.

Immediately, warmth.

It shivered through her fingers and down her wrist, hesitant and humming and  _ relief. _ Like the barest breath of wind on a scorching day.

The tips of her fingers went from pins-and-needles freezing to utterly and mercifully numb. She held the lighter closer to her body seeking that heat in the rest of her arm, her other limbs, her cheeks and her nose and her lips and her ears, and her insides where they grumbled for warmth and an end to waking up in the morning shivering and going to bed icy-numb, this constant constant constant  _ cold— _

“Hey-y, Sash, you’re back!”

She flicked the lighter off at Mick’s voice, and the chill crept back in.

*

Rita speed walked through the Archives office with her bag and the pet carrier bundled up in her arms, tossing a greeting over her shoulder.

“Hi Mister Mercury hope you found something expensive oh my god Miss Wire good to see you back glad you’re okay nice coat by the way very very pretty scarf tell me where you got it later okay I gotta go into my office now bye—!”

She slammed the door behind her and tossed her bag to the ground.

Whatever was inside the carrier wriggled around anxiously as Rita gently placed it onto the desk.

(A couple of papers were shoved onto the floor in the process, but that was fi-ine. She’d just pick them up later. Or leave them on the paperwork-chair.)

She undid the latch, hooked her finger through one of the holes in the mesh door. Something furry brushed against it.

“Okay,” she whispered to herself, then to whatever was in the carrier: “I’m gonna open this now!”

No response. Rita pulled open the door.

For a moment, nothing happened, and she was just staring at the dark opening of the pet carrier. Then—

A little baby bunny hopped out.

Rita squealed, and the rabbit crouched down, watching her. It was at least part sewer rabbit—with the itty bitty claws and multiple eyes—but maybe also part ‘weird other rabbit breed that doesn’t grow taller than your ankle’?

“Oh  _ hello, _ beautiful,” Rita cooed, crouching down in front of her desk to get on eye level. “Aren’t you just the cutest little thing I’ve ever seen in my life?”

The rabbit continued to stare at her.

“Aw, jeez, what do bunnies eat? Carrots? Lettuce?” Its nose twitched, and Rita took that as a win. “Lettuce it is, then! I dunno why Mis—Doctor Monrovian even had you at all, s’not like there’s anything wrong with you.”

The rabbit made a low, drawn-out noise, and chose that moment to open its mouth and reveal its teeth. Its long, needle-like teeth.

“Oh, I see! That’s what he—”

A tiny, twitching ball of fur launched itself at Rita’s face.

Rita yelped, struggling to grab it before it could bite. It kicked furiously in Rita’s grasp, gnashing its teeth and growling breathily.

Trying to keep her grip was like trying to hold onto one of those slippery tube things that  _ always _ slid out of her hands when she was a kid, and Rita was seriously worried that she was gonna get mauled and tell everyone that her scars were from a bunny-attack. A bunny attack!

At that moment, the office door burst open. “Hey Rita, have you seen my—what the hell.”

Mister Steel stood in the doorway, watching Rita grapple with a frenzied rabbit. “Mister Stee-eel! Help me!”

She heard him approach, but was too busy  _ not being murdered by a bunny _ to enjoy the incredulous look on his face.

Mister Steel reached over and plucked the rabbit out of her hands.

He stared at it while Rita caught her breath, holding it at arms’ length, one hand firmly hooked under its front legs, the other supporting its furry rump.

“Rita, where the hell did you get—hey, don’t _you_ _growl_ at me.”

“I went to visit that, um, evil doctor guy.  _ Very _ nice, even if he is a bad person, and he serves the meat god, by the way.”

“You did  _ what?!” _ The rabbit chose his moment of distraction to attempt to wiggle free, but Mister Steel just tightened his grip. “Nice try, small fry.”

The rabbit grunted irritably in response.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. Birth is a curse and existence is a prison. You think any of the rest of us want to be here?”

While it stared, unimpressed, at Mister Steel, Rita spoke up. “You talking to the bunny is super cute and all, Mister Steel, and I wish I could record all this right now, but what are we supposed to do with it?”

Mister Steel squinted. “It’s a sewer rabbit, right?”

“That’s what I thought, too, but see the shape of its nose? It’s also part, um, mini-rabbit?”

“So if we throw it to the sewers, it might be mauled by the bigger ones,” Mister Steel’s frown deepened. “We can’t do that.”

“Uh-huh. And my landlord says no pets allowed… but yours doesn’t…” she brightened. “Mister Steel!”

“No. No way.”

“Aw-w, c’mon—”

*

Mister Steel ended up keeping Small Fry. 

On the condition that he would bring her into the office every day, as a replacement for their broken paper shredder.

*

On the way back to her apartment, Sasha stopped at a mall and bought the biggest candle she could find. One that had three wicks.

When she got home, she turned the heating up (which did nothing, only leech at her bank account). And lit the candles.

The smell of burning, of smoke, was barely there, just a brush against the top of her throat. But it grounded her. Her shoulders slumped for the first time in days.

And it was  _ warm. _

She tried not to dwell on it as she phoned the funeral director.

*

Rita clenched her hand where it was tucked into the crook of Miss Buddy’s elbow. “Where’re they supposed to be?”

The two of them stood in the middle of a bustling square, sliding from stall to stall in an attempt not to stand out. Miss Buddy picked up a jade-coloured necklace and pretended to hold it up to the light, instead glancing around the crowd. “They are  _ always  _ here on Thursdays. Usually, right over…”

Miss Buddy placed the necklace back down, feigning disinterest as she turned herself and Rita around, striding towards a gap in the stalls where a busker sat on a blanket, strumming a guitar as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

“Is that them?” Rita whispered. Miss Buddy nodded, the shallowest duck of her head as they navigated the knot of people. A high, melodic humming came from where the busker sat, eyes closed, grip lax.

The closer Rita and Miss Buddy got to them, the clearer the humming became. It was so gentle. Rounded off, almost, like if she could reach out and touch it, it would be smooth as glass.

“Hey, Archivist,” the busker said once they reached the edge of the blanket, eyes still closed. “Come to take my statement at last? No-ot, gonna lie, I was feeling a little left out, y’know.”

“Should I take your statement?” Rita asked. “I mean, I will if you want me to, but it’s not really…”

Miss Buddy swooped in and saved the day. Or just Rita. “We’re here to talk about Miasma, if you don’t mind.”

M’tendere strummed their guitar once, slowly, thumbing each of the strings as they went down. “What is there to talk about?”

“What does Miasma want with the bomb? And don’t lie, darling, the Archivist will know.”

“I will?!” Rita stage-whispered.

M’tendere tilted their head lazily. The neckline of their sweatshirt slipped slightly, exposing skin and… dark tattoos, moving, writhing in indiscernible shapes. Lines like guitar strings intertwined and unwove in sudden, spasmodic movements, lashing out, rearing back, curling and zig-zagging and nauseating.

“I don’t know,” they said. “All she wanted was some blueprints. Didn’t tell me anything beyond that, and I didn’t ask.”

“Blueprints, you say? Do elaborate.”

“You really want me to say it here? Alright, I gave her blueprints for a  _ bomb.” _ M’tendere put the guitar down beside them.

Rita snuck her hands into her pockets, tucked her face a little further into the collar of her coat. “Wh-Why’d you do that? You know she ain’t using ‘em for any good cause,”

M’tendere regarded her with hooded eyes. “Why are you here, Archivist?” The noise of the crowd babbled and belled behind her. “I can’t help you. I haven’t helped anyone in years.”

Miss Buddy knelt down on the blanket so she wasn’t craning her head downwards. Rita followed suit. “You very well may be the only one who can help us. Miasma’s plans have left us in a somewhat  _ sticky _ situation.”

“I, uh, would it help if I took your statement?” Rita offered. “You seem awful closed off, and maybe, I mean, it might help if we understood you a little better?”

“Nice proposal,” M’tendere considered it. “You sure about it? Can’t say it’s fun inside my head.”

“I’m sure she’s been in worse heads than yours,” Miss Buddy turned to Rita.  _ “Are _ you completely certain, though, Rita dear? The Slaughter is known for being… hm.  _ Unpredictable _ may be the best word for it. Erratic, unstable, jarring, I could go on.”

“Don’t you  _ even _ worry, Miss Buddy! Or you, M’tendere!” 

M’tendere saluted sarcastically. “Al _ right, _ do I just… start talking?” Rita nodded, and they took a deep breath. “I never wanted to be an avatar. Of any kind, really, but especially not The One Who Butchers. That’s not to say I didn’t have a choice. Yeah, the worst part of it is, I  _ did _ have a choice. I didn’t have to build that bomb. I knew it made for killing people, hell, I knew other people had probably been killed by my shit before that. I still built it.”

*

“...Everyone has a moment. You know, that  _ one _ moment where you cross the line, go from ‘human’ to ‘vessel for the powers’? That was my moment. Watching those people die, no last words, no swell of music on their way out, just. Die. From something  _ I _ built. And there were sirens and there was yelling and there was crunching and I watched Jet Siquliak revv up his engine and get the fuck out of dodge without so much as a sad glint in his eye.

“And all I could think was,  _ I’m going to be standing here for the rest of my life. _ I couldn’t imagine this moment ending, couldn’t imagine ever moving on, and I knew, I  _ knew  _ I was going to see these people’s mangled bodies in my dreams until the Slaughter lets me go.”

Somewhere, distantly, the crowd kept throbbing. Miss Buddy was beside her, still and silent. But these things were registered in a far corner of her mind, back-alley thoughts and barely-there white noise.

Rita’s senses tunneled, directing all focus to the person in front of her, to the words that ran from their mouth, nudged, pulled,  _ compelled. _

“The one who calls herself Miasma came to me a couple of weeks ago. The Slaughter was getting hungry, so I agreed to design a bomb for her. A bomb, of sorts.

“It’s made to send these  _ massive  _ clouds of ash up into the sky.”

Miss Buddy straightened up with a jerk.

“I don’t really know what she’s trying to do here, but you and I both know it’s not going to benefit anyone. I put in a button, to permanently disarm it, I’ll show you the blueprints. Press and hold it for ten seconds, and the thing will be no more dangerous than, hm-m, a big hailstone.”

M’tendere seemed to be finished, the staticky feeling in Rita’s head fading. One last thing; “Do you know where she’s gonna take the bomb? Or, or when she’s gonna use it?”

Their fingers tapped a dance across their leg, as if they couldn’t stand to be still. “Where? No clue. Probably somewhere high up, she kept going on about the sky and the clouds and all.”

Miss Buddy leaned forward, hair waving gently in the wind. “Did she say when? This is very important.”

“February 18th. She was like,  _ super _ intense about that. Kept telling me to check the weather, atmospheric conditions, take ‘em all into account.” M’tendere shrugged, pulling folded blueprints out of his bag. “She’s crazy, I can tell you that much.”

“February 18th?” Miss Buddy sat back on her heels, brow pinched.

And for a moment, Rita was just as lost, because why the heck was February 18th more important than over any other day—?

Until something surfaced in her mind, like a bad thought, like an old memory. Like a character in a stream that everyone thought was dead until they appeared to either make or break everything during the most crucial moment.

Until her left inner elbow began to itch wildly until it went beyond  _ itching _ and became  _ pain. _

Until she knew.

“The Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat,” Rita recited, as if from textbook, as if from memory, “was declared extinct on the 18th of February, in the year 2019. It’s considered the first species to be wiped out as a result of climate change.”

Miss Buddy’s lips set, her eye grim. M’tendere, on the other hand, tapped his chin.

“Interesting. Does that normally happen? Does the Watcher just… tell you things?”

Rita blinked, and she was a normal person again, and she hugged herself. “I-I don’t—that’s—”

Miss Buddy closed her hand around Rita’s elbow, brushing against the painful part. Rita squeaked, but Miss Buddy didn’t seem to notice, skimming the blueprint of the bomb. “It’s been nice talking to you, M’tendere. I’m sure this conversation was very enlightening for all parties involved. What do you plan on doing, after this? You know Miasma will come for you for lying to her?”

M’tendere’s hand drifted towards the neck of their guitar, stroking almost silently over the strings. “I’m gonna disappear.” They said. “Find somewhere else. Pick up inventing, again, maybe. Non-violent. I’ve got some new ideas.”

At this, their mouth quirked up at the corner, as if at an old joke Rita didn’t get.

“As for feeding the Slaughter, I’ll figure something out. Maybe burn ants, or something. Project slasher horror movies onto public buildings.”

Slowly, Miss Buddy lifted herself and Rita to their feet. “They don’t call you a supergenius for no reason, darling. I believe in you.”

M’tendere smiled, and Rita had been mistaken before. Nothing they did was lazy, or relaxed. It was… sickly, sort of. Hollow. Like the reason behind it had been lost.

“Ditto,” Rita chirped. “You’re gonna be fine, M’tendere, I’m telling you now. In a year you’re gonna look back on today and you’re gonna be like ‘wow, Rita was so right! As always!’”

“Hope that’s true, Rita. Be careful out there.”

*

He stared down at the letter in his hands, branded neatly with the Institute’s symbol.  _ To my dear friend, _ the opening line read.

He frowned. He was not Ramses O’Flaherty’s ‘dear friend’. They had worked together a couple of times, back when he was able to work with anyone, but they had never been friends.

_ I wish to ask a favour of you. If, at any point, I expire in the next year or so—you know that health is a fickle thing—I ask that you take up a job at my Institute. Not at the head, I’m afraid that position is well and truly booked. Hiding in the backdrop of a picture is far more your style, am I correct? _

_ I should hope you will never need this information, but if the situation ever arises, this is a brief summary of what must be carried out: _

He scanned the rest of the page, then heaved a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose.

He did not want to ever do this.

He did not have to ever do this.

He could write back and say he would not ever do this.

But. He did owe O’Flaherty a favour. And, though the old man was asking a lot of him, he seemed certain the plan would result in a better future for all.

_ Together, we can do good. _

He wrote back. He agreed to help.

*

The moment she and Miss Buddy stepped off the last stair down to the dark, empty Archives, Rita was scrabbling at the buttons of her coat, pulling it off and tossing it onto Mister Mercury’s desk chair.

“Are you quite alright, Rita d—” Miss Buddy cut herself off as Rita pulled up her own sleeve, exposing her left elbow. “Oh.”

There was a lump the size of a golf ball wedged into the inside of Rita’s elbow. The skin of it was ruddy and irritated, and it burned as if something was trying to bite its way out of her flesh.

“Oh  _ jeez _ oh my god Miss Buddy, am I gonna die? Am I dying?!” Rita’s right hand hovered just an inch away from the lump. “Oh man, this is just like in all the medical dramas where they find out they’ve got like two and a half days to live and they gotta say goodbye to their wife and kids and I ain’t even  _ got _ a wife Miss Buddy—”

The woman in question knelt down on one knee to inspect the growth closer. “Rita,” she said, interrupting Rita’s babblings, “Rita, darling. You’re not dying.”

“Well what the heck is goin’ on, then?!”

Miss Buddy turned her arm so that Rita could see her own apparently-not-a-tumour better. “Look at this.”

Rita dared a peek at the thing on her elbow. A red line, horizontal, sliced across the diameter of the bulge. “Ohmygod—”

And the skin stretched across the lump peeled and

_ Opened. _

*

“All of the matter in the universe would fit into about 1 billion cubic light years, or a cube that's approximately 1,000 light years on each side.” The low voice of the man in the documentary could be heard from anywhere in the apartment. “That means that only about 0.0000000000000000000042 percent of the universe contains any matter.”

Juno scrubbed a hand across his face. He scratched across—wow, he really needed to shave. And shower, maybe, and eat dinner. And sleep. He really, really needed sleep.

Something kept him there, dark tendrils of curiosity. The rumbling voice kept pouring from the speakers of his comms.

“We have only explored about four percent of the visible universe.”

His hands were numb.

“There are more stars visible in the night sky than there are grains of sand on the planet.”

The bottom dropped out of his stomach. He was empty inside. A speck of dust floating amongst a billion other specks of dust atop a bread-crumb planet.

Juno’s head swooped, feverish with vertigo, and he held, white-knuckled, to the arm of his couch. The floor disappeared beneath his feet, the ceiling gave way to low-hung clouds and beyond that was the horrible, stifling, breathtaking, beautiful, maddening  _ emptiness— _

—something thumped onto his lap.

Small Fry grumbled at him, stomping her little paw and butting her head against his stomach.  _ Feed me, feed me, you pitiful lady. _

Juno opened his mouth, and what came out was not the reedy, echoing call of the void, nor was it the baritone-hum breathing of something so endlessly massive that his tiny human brain could not even begin to comprehend.

He startled at the sound of his own voice, cracked, uncertain.

“Yeah, yeah, keep your fluffy tail on.” He grouched back, lifting her off.

Every tread felt as though he was about to miss the bottom step of a staircase, that his foot would pitch into empty air, that the plunging feeling would return.

It didn’t, and the floor remained solid. The skin around his eyes was cold and wet.

Juno closed the blinds on his kitchen window, for some pretence of peace.

*

Sasha dropped a folded piece of paper into her ashtray, and set it alight.

The flame was bright and sickly, tearing through the paper as it curled and blackened and crumbled. She brought her hand up to it; the tips of the fire nipped at the pads of her fingers, traced along the lines of her palm.

It danced upwards, ever upwards, coiling itself between her fingers, catching the shallow webbing.

It would not hurt her. She almost wished it would.

*

_ Notes on new candidates for the Archive: _

_ Sasha Wire - Too risky. Ms. Wire is to be my successor, should I perish or retire; to have her harmed or mistrustful of me is out of the question. _

_ Annie Wire - Unlikely. Incurious and too trusting. Seeks the approval of others to a self-destructive degree. Would not thrive in the position of Archivist. _

_ Juno Steel - Strong choice. Has a habit of sticking his nose where it isn’t wanted, and lacks self-preservation instincts. Used to be a detective. However, the lack of self-preservation borders on self-destruction, perhaps even suicidal tendencies. In a place as volatile as the Archives, he is liable to get himself killed before the year is out. _

_ Rita _ _ \- Wild card. Unpromising contender at first glance, has astonishing levels of inquisitiveness. I caught her looking through my mail for, “juicy gossip” before, wanted to know if I was having an affair. Capable of taking in several springs of information at once, if her watching streams while working IT while also eavesdropping on others’ conversations is any indication. This is all without even bringing up her skills in hacking. The issue is that she is not overly antagonistic, which would not give the powers a reason to mark her. I suppose they rarely need a reason. _

_ (Reminder: Encrypt mail before I send it. Ask responders to do the same.) _

*

Rita, curled up in her office chair, wrapped her right arm around her knees, the other hanging limp. She was bundled up in a coat that wasn’t her own; from the faint whiff of sandalwood and cigarette smoke, she guessed it was Miss Buddy’s.

Miss Buddy herself was kneeling in front of her, examining, without touching, the  _ awful _ thing in her arm.

“Is it gonna be there forever?” Rita asked, voice small. “It’s kinda real ugly, Miss Buddy.”

“I wouldn’t worry, Rita.” Miss Buddy’s lips flattened. “I’ve seen far more hideous transformations than this.”

“Whaddya mean, transformations?!”

“You are aware that you are an avatar of the Beholding, correct?”

“Well,  _ knowin’  _ it and  _ seein’ _ it are two different things!” Rita tugged at one of the sparkly clips in her hair. “What if I just keep on growing eyes til I’m eyes all over like some kinda, kinda horror movie!”

“I very much doubt that.” Miss Buddy clasped both of Rita’s hands in her own. “The Eye, much like the Web and the Lonely, is one of the far more  _ subtle _ powers. It does not work in ghastly imagery.”

Rita untucked her legs, leaving them dangling off the lip of the chair. “Am I turning into a monster?”

“You are.”

Rita crossed her ankles over, pressing her legs together and staring down at her hands, curled in her lap. Out of the corner of her eye, her elbow stared back. “Oh. Okay.”

Miss Buddy heaved a breath that  _ might _ have been a sigh if she were a little less poised, and said, “Rita. I’m going to show you something very important now.”

Rita looked up, pushing up her glasses from where they’d slipped to the end of her nose. Miss Buddy had her hands in her hair, pulling out invisible pins from one side of it. Strands of her hair that once curled into her face fell limp, and Miss Buddy pushed it all aside to show the hidden part of her face.

The skin was leached, grey-tinted. Even… dead-looking, almost. Like all the blood and fat and everything else a face was supposed to have inside it had been sucked clean out. Her eyebrow must’ve been taken in whatever awful thing happened to cause this, along with her eyelashes. And  _ oh, _ her  _ eyes. _

One large, roundish eye sat where an eye usually sits. Several others, smaller, clustered around the first, blinking disjointedly. All of them were dark and shiny and stared right at Rita.

“Oh my god, Miss Buddy, what the heck happened to you?!”

Miss Buddy raised her eyebrow. “The Web happened, darling. I would’ve thought that was obvious.”

Rita shook her head. “But what did it  _ do _ to you? Like, Mister Kanagawa lost his arm in the larvae incident, and Miss Cass was buried alive, and M’tendere watched their bombs kill all those people, and—”

“Rita.” Miss Buddy reached up to land her hand on Rita’s shoulder. “I am not the Corruption, nor am I Choke, and I most certainly am  _ not _ the Slaughter. And neither are you.”

Rita tilted her head, and Miss Buddy continued, multiple eyes still glittering in the darkness.

“The Spider, the Eye, and the Lonely form a triad of paranoia fears. We are quiet, the ones who creep.” Miss Buddy ran her free thumb along the border between her healthy and ashen skin. “To put it frankly, M’tendere was wrong when they said every avatar has one single moment. This did not happen to me in one burst of sudden violence. The Mother of Puppets works slowly, patiently. As does the Ceaseless Watcher, to a certain extent.

“That is to say, what is happening to you is only the beginning. You have a long road ahead of you, Archivist.”

Rita blinked, scrunched her hands up in her lap. “Please don’t do that.”

“Hm?”

“You called me ‘Archivist’ again. I like it way better when people call me Rita.”

“Very well, Rita.”

*

Juno stepped down into the Archives, and his throat did not close up at how suddenly he felt too big for the space he was in, how he  _ felt _ the sky disappearing from above him.

Sasha sorted through old statements, listened to the sliding of paper against paper, and did not think about matchsticks and dry files and the smell of lighter fluid.

Mick turned the heating up when Sasha asked, and tried not to notice the tension.

*

Rita shuffled out of her office, hands clasped behind her back, and stuttered through an explanation of everything that had happened with Miss Buddy the evening prior.

When she lifted her arm to show them, though, for a moment all any of them could see was an empty socket where the eye should’ve been, and a dangling pink string hanging from it.

Mister Mercury shouted and Mister Steel flinched for his gun automatically, and then Rita looked down and saw what was freaking them all out so much.

It turned out, the eye had actually rolled out of the socket in her elbow and was now hanging from its own nerve, swinging like a bare lightbulb in an evil villain’s workshop. The eye twisted around awkwardly to stare up at her, as if it wasn’t quite sure what was going on either.

“Aw, jee-eez,” Rita said. “It’s even grosser now!”

“Rita, does that… hurt?” Miss Wire asked, lowering herself to one knee to squint at it.

“Miss Wire, I didn’t even know it was like this until two seconds ago,”

Mister Steel’s hand was no longer hovering over his gun, but the guarded expression didn’t vanish. “Christ. Should we call a doctor? An optician?”

“The first aid kit’s in your office, Miss Rita,” Mister Mercury offered. “Or, at least, the Artifacts Storage people said it  _ should  _ be in there. Workers rights, or something like that.”

“I ain’t never seen a first aid box in there!”

Miss Wire’s eyes hardened. “I’m getting one for the Archives as soon as we fix this thing in your arm.”

“Quick question: what are we supposed to  _ do  _ with a first aid kit, in this situation? Not like we can just snip it off.”

“We  _ could—” _ Miss Wire cut off Rita’s squeak and the click of Mister Steel opening his mouth to argue— “but we won’t. Rita. Is this happening because… because of the eldritch powers?”

Mister Steel opened his mouth again, probably to remark on Miss Wire suddenly now believing in the god thingies, but that would probably end in an argument so Rita started talking first. “Mm-hm, yeah, Miss Buddy said this is only the beginning of my, like, transformation, so I dunno if there’s any point in cuttin’ it off.”

“Wow, are you gonna turn into some kinda, eye monster or something?”

“Mister Mercury-y, that’s what  _ I _ sa—”

There was a small, muted thud, and the sound of something rolling. Rita’s arm was lighter.

Mister Steel knelt down to look at the now-disembodied eyeball that just fell off Rita’s arm, which stared right back. “New development, guys.”

*

“So the bomb has a deactivate button. That’s great. Does this mean we don’t have to work with those weird archivists anymore?”

“Vespa, dear, we still need to be able to reach the bomb in the first place. Plus, someone must fend Miasma and her forces off while the button is being held down. We can’t risk it.”

“...Fine. So. February 18th. Know where?”

“I have an idea.”

*

“Imperium Hotel,” Miss Buddy said, leaning languid against Rita’s desk. “That is our current running theory as to where Miasma is going to enact her plans.”

Mister Steel huffed, from beside the doorway that hadn’t been there five minutes ago. “And your reasoning for this is…?”

“It’s where Brock Engstrom’s body was found, and presumably where she murdered him.”

“To no one’s sorrow,” came Mister Ransom’s garbled voice. Miss Vespa made a gruff noise that was either a laugh or a warning.

Miss Buddy pulled a map out of nowhere. “It’s not uncommon for an avatar preparing for a ritual to  _ taint _ the location beforehand. Be it with blood, other bodily fluids, or something else entirely.”

Mister Steel muttered something like  _ “...bodily fluids…?” _ and was ignored.

“Vespa and I went to investigate the other day. It was recently closed to the public for violation of hygiene regulations.”

Miss Vespa tilted her head, lip curled. “The plumbing was filled with sewage.”

“And all the restaurant food was filled with plastic, the floors slick with oil, and one of the cops investigating was hospitalized for  _ radiation poisoning.” _ Miss Buddy shook her head. “Unless the hotel was recently assaulted by the Anti-Cleaning fairy, I believe we can safely assume that this is how the Extinction marks its territory.

“Now, the plan is this: the seven of us will meet up here, in Rita’s office, on the eighteenth, in three da—”

There was a clearing of her throat as Miss Buddy cut herself off, blinking down at the floor. Or, more specifically, at the thing that had just rolled into her foot. The eyeball.

Rita was there in a second, scooping it up by the optic nerve. “Oh, Miss Buddy, I’m so so sorry about that, hi, hello, this is Frannie Jr., it was hiding under my desk when you guys came in and  _ I’m _ not gonna be the one who disturbs it, here, I’ll just—”

Miss Buddy held up a hand. “There’s no need for that, darling. This… Frannie Jr… is the same eye that was growing in your elbow, last night?”

Mister Ransom choked on his own throat and Miss Vespa fumbled with her knife. “What…?”

“Uh huh! When I went to show Mister Mercury and Mister Steel and Miss Wire this morning, it was just—” Rita put her hand against her left elbow and pulled an invisible line downwards— “and then when we looked again it was just, on the ground! Like something out of a zombie stream, or, or Frankenstein!”

“It’s definitely something,” Miss Wire said.

“Ho-old the phone,” Mister Steel held up a finger. “Hey, are we gonna get eye-elbows as well? Mick, Sash and I all work for the Eye Guy too, and I’d really rather not spend my time popping eyeballs like pimples.”

“Gross, Steel.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that, Juno,” Miss Buddy replied. “Transformations are reserved for avatars, and Rita is the only avatar of the Beholding in this room.”

Mister Mercury cleared his throat. “Is it weird that I’m kind of disappointed?”

Miss Buddy nodded sagely. “Now, on with the plan.”

*

After the meeting with the spider lady and her super cool scary knife girlfriend, Mick walked into the back room to grab the three kilos of crack Sasha had asked him to get.

(He hadn’t read the backstory statement about  _ that, _ even if he really, really, wanted to, because seriously, Sash! As Rita would say, this it somethin’ out of the super-spy movies! Or even those crime ones where the big mafia guy sits behind his desk and smokes a cigar for half the movie!

Anyway, apparently it “wasn’t supernatural enough” for Artifacts Storage, and Mister O’Flaherty didn’t want to have to explain to the cops how they came into possession of enough drugs to buy a yacht, so it got dumped in the storage room of the Archives.)

Mick was starting to get the hang of the Institute’s organization system (for reasons entirely unrelated to his new online store) and was hoping to get in and out with the drugs in time to sneak into Rita’s office and finish  _ Castle 2: The Harrowing Corridors of Helix. _

He heard a weird noise from the side.

Turning, really hoping this wasn’t another moth infestation, because Cecil Kanagawa was fun but he was a  _ lot _ and Sasha hated calling him to come pick up his moth-babies, Mick saw a figure.

Nope, two figures. The shorter one, slouched slightly, was obviously Jay. The other… Peter Ransom?

Mick didn’t know who else had three joints in their right wrist alone. Like a LEGO Bionicle.

Peter R. seemed to have his face pressed to the side of Jay’s—wait, no, he was… kissing his cheek?

Then a gauzy  _ “darling…” _ floated through the air of the (small) storage room, and Mick stepped back, figuring Jay wouldn’t be too happy to see him there.

Of course, Mick’s heel banged off the corner of a shelving unit, causing the entire thing to tremble like a guitar string, and  _ several  _ boxes to topple off and flop next to his feet.

Mick grinned sheepishly at Jay’s scowl and Ransom’s wide, cat-eye reflective stare.

“Haha, hey guys, didn’t see you there, lemme just…” he cleared his throat and grabbed the first box that looked like it might have crack cocaine in it, “take my drugs and leave and you two can go back to, um, yeah, bye!”

_ “Mick…!” _

*

Ramses O’Flaherty brought his free hand up to his jaw, prodding, massaging at the tightness there.

The other continued writing, writing frantically, because if he could just get this  _ right _ then it would change it all, uproot society at its core and he could make something  _ good _ out of it. All he had to do was get it right.

His writing became sloppy, spilling up and down on the notebook’s lines, like a wave, like the hills and valleys to be recreated, as both hands became cold, sweaty, numb.

*

Fifteen minutes before Miss Buddy and the others were due to arrive, all four archive employees were gathered in the basement office, waiting, fidgeting.

Mister Mercury (who had been dragged there, physically, by Miss Wire, to ensure he wouldn’t be late) was chattering a mile a minute, telling them all about the things he sold on his online store. If they sounded suspiciously similar to items that had recently vacated Artifacts Storage, no one felt like saying anything.

Mister Steel, of course, had to punctuate anything anyone said with something snarky.

“You sold it to  _ Nova Zolotovna? _ I didn’t think she had time for online shopping in between publicly proposing to strangers and dying her hair  _ even brighter _ shades of red, and whatever else rich people do.”

“C’mon, Jay, rich people  _ love _ superna—antique stuff. And her hair’s blue! ...I think it looks kinda nice.”

“Like hell it—” Mister Steel cut himself off, and all the air in the room went stony.

Rita’s shoulders bunched up under her ears, and Miss Wire’s knuckles went white around the rim of her desk. A crease formed between Mister Mercury’s eyebrows, gaze skittering between the other three frantically.

Mister Steel cleared his throat. “I’m—yeah, I’m sure it’s not… y’know…”

“It’s dead,” Miss Wire said coolly. “It’s dead.”

Mister Mercury began twisting his hands together. “I mean, you guys are probably right, and we shouldn’t worry about it, at all, but… what if, you know—”

“Don’t finish that sentence, Mick,” Miss Wire warned.

Rita tripped her fingers across her comms’ keyboard, nausea churning her stomach like bricks in a cement mixer. She could feel Not-Annie’s ghost breathing down her neck, all zig-zagging limbs and face-splitting grin and whispery hair.

She shut her eyes. Opened them, to read the first page of the search results.

“Guys, it’s okay!” Rita turned her comms around to show the others the screen. “It says right here that Miss Zolotovna got a  _ whole  _ makeover recently and that she dyed her hair as well, they even have before and after pictures, come look!”

The other three gathered around, murmuring and nudging each other.

Miss Wire went  _ I told you so  _ as if she hadn’t gone greyer than a stormcloud at the thought of the Not-Them, and everyone relaxed.

After that, Miss Buddy, Miss Vespa, and Mister Ransom came in, and they didn’t talk about that little scare again.

*

Shadows flitted at the corners of her eyes. Vespa screwed them shut, tried to focus on the voices of the people around her, the vibrations of her own feet on the ground. 

_...guess for Miasma’s location is on the rooftop. _ Buddy’s voice.

Steel cut in,  _ Is the elevator working? The elevator’s working, right? _

_ I think you already know t he an s… _ And Vespa could only make out the vague shape of Buddy’s words after that, as they’re muddled by the pad of footsteps, the repeated thumps of something numerous and fleeing, the scampering of a creature full of blood and covered in soft, breakable skin.

Vespa forced her eyes open.  _ Chase me, _ the things that weren’t real sang to her without words,  _ chase me, catch me, kill me. _ She looked away from where a hind leg disappeared around a corner. No one else reacted to it, so it probably wasn’t there.

The Archivist was staring at her. Vespa dug her fingers into the stiff material of her jacket pockets, and didn’t bite her head off.

“Whatcha  _ looking _ at, Archivist?” Maybe it came out with a bit more acidity than she intended, if the target’s squeak was any indication.

“Nothin’! You just look like you’re distracted, is all. Like you’re  _ real _ deep in thought. So…”

“If you ask me what I’m thinking about, or—” Vespa’s heart wrapped itself around her windpipe— “even, even  _ think _ about using your little mind-control on me—”

“Miss Vespa, I would never!”

The Archivist got a grunt in response, with the addition of some threat involving knives and intestines vacating their intended location, and after that Vespa chose to stare at her slowly-coming-untied laces for a little while.

She dragged her thumbnail idly along the handle of one of her knives, one she’d had for a while. It was familiar, if not as grounding as she’d hoped. But she didn’t close her hand around the handle.

If the insistence of the noises in her head was any indication, she didn’t, didn’t really trust herself to actually hold it right now.

Vespa didn’t say anything for the remainder of their trip to the hotel.

*

“If this place was shut down for, y’know, the guests getting poisoned just by being inside, shouldn’t we wear gas masks or something?”

“Juno, darling, it’s a bit of sewage in the water, not nuclear meltdown. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

“I don’t think you understand the gravity of this. The owners of this place were rich as hell, had connections with local politicians and in the underworld, and they still  _ somehow _ managed to get shut down. Do you know how bad a place has to be for that to happen?”

“Fair point. Does anyone have a gas mask?”

“…I do. I have one in my bag.”

“Of course you do, Sash.”

*

The seven of them huddled in front of the main entrance. Vespa tried putting a bit of distance between her and the others as subtly as possible. Not very.

“Well, shall we?” Ransom moved—in that stupid grand way he always did—to open the door. “It doesn’t seem to be locked.”

“Yeah, like that’d stop you,” Steel muttered, and Vespa kicked his shin, more annoyed than anything that she was about to say the exact same thing. The Archivist muffled something from within the gas mask.

Buddy held an arm out, stopping Ransom in his tracks. “Just to be safe, I’d prefer for someone else to open the door. Not anything personal, but being transported into your tacky hallways for a month or two might delay the mission somewhat.”

“No offence taken. You’re the captain, after all,” there definitely was offence taken. “I don’t choose the Spiral’s wallpaper, by the way.”

“I should hope not.” Buddy pushed the hotel door open, into a dark lobby that Vespa immediately decided must be Hell itself for all the stench and heat emanating from it.

Vespa shoved her face into her own jacket, Mercury pinched both his mouth and nose shut (would he remember the human need to breathe before he suffocated? Did Vespa care?), Buddy stepped back in distaste, right into Steel, who nearly stumbled right onto his ass while complaining the entire time, and Ransom pulled a nose-clip out of nowhere and put it on like a snobby rich guy putting on a pair of tiny spectacles.

Only the Archivist and Wire seemed unaffected, Wire even shuffling a little closer to the open, exhaling doorway. And Vespa thought the Archives people couldn’t be any bigger freaks.

“What—Christ—what the hell  _ is _ that?” Steel pushed his sleeve to his nose and mouth.

Buddy pulled her scarf up over her lower face, considering. “The smell can safely be ruled as a product of the Extinction,” Vespa stared into the maw of the doorway, suddenly very open and vulnerable and seen, “perhaps the heat, too, but it’s a bit…”

She kept talking, but Vespa couldn’t hear. There was a stocky figure, in the darkness of the lobby in front of them. Arms crossed, leaning against the slimy bannister of the staircase. Too difficult to make out any details beyond that, aside from the two orange pinpricks where its eyes presumably were.

Vespa wanted to write this off. Or, not wanted, but it would be easier to. After Rasbach, the Hunt had clenched its ugly, bloodied fist around her hallucinations, a plaything, a mouse stuck in the cat’s claws. When it felt like it, it turned what she saw from memories—little bits of the past and present that escaped her brain and splayed into Vespa’s real world, mingling with it until she couldn’t separate the two—to vague shapes that escaped when she turned her head. Hind legs disappearing around corners, maybe-human faces at the edges of her vision, breath against the back of her neck when she knew she was alone.

_ Chase me, catch me, kill me. _

The others said nothing about the outline of a person, which she usually used as the litmus test for whether she was hallucinating or not. But after Rasbach—

(Because of course she changed after Rasbach, everything changed after Rasbach, Rasbach and blood splashing down between her fingers from his slit throat, caking under her fingernails and into the lines of her skin, red smeared on her face, in her eyes and mouth upon ripping the muzzle off with her bare hands,  _ I’m not a monster, I’m not an animal _ and something that wasn’t Vespa (but wanted her to think it was) purred  _ good girl—) _

—After Rasbach, her eyesight had gotten… sharp. Really, really sharp. Sharp enough to read the label of a soup can 30 feet away, or to pick out individual blades of grass from the window of a ten-story building’s top floor.

Or to catch the outline of a figure in a nearly pitch black room.

Vespa stepped closer to the open hotel door. The twin pinpricks grew brighter, and a wave of heat lapped out the doorway, stopping everyone in their tracks. She pulled her hands out of her pockets, flexing them until she found her voice.

“There’s someone in there,”

Steel leaned forward, squinting. “I don’t see anything,”

“Me neither. Wait, I don’t have my glasses on. Did I even bring my glasses?”

“Mister Mercury, you wear glasses?!”

“We’re getting off track,” Buddy held up a hand, not looking away from the darkness inside the hotel. “Vespa, dear, what do they look like? Where are they?”

“...They’re over by the staircase,” a voice that wasn’t Vespa’s cut in. “That’s where the heat is coming from.”

Sasha Wire’s eyes were bright, jittery. She stared past all of them, right to where the outline stood, but her eyes weren’t focused. Like she wasn’t actually seeing the figure, just… looking to where she thought it would be.

Vespa cleared her throat, nodding to confirm Wire’s words. She didn’t like the shaky light in Wire’s eyes. They weren’t exactly like the orange spots in the darkness before her, but something akin to it. Something that made her cross her arms against her ribs, hugging herself under the pretense of a defensive gesture.

“Hey, Sash, you gotta have a flashlight somewhere in there, don’tcha?” Steel nudged her, eyeing the many pockets of Wire’s coat. Wordlessly, she pulled out three and tossed them to whoever was closest. Steel, the Archivist, and Vespa, who passed hers onto Buddy.

All three shone their torches in the general direction of where Wire was looking. Two hit sections of staircase, but Steel’s flashlight illuminated a toothy face.

Of course, this was followed by him jumping like a scared rabbit and the face dissolving back into shadow.

“Christ, are they just standing there in the dark? Who  _ does _ that?” Steel stage-whispered.

Before Vespa could get a snarky remark in edgeways, Ransom responded, “For the dramatics of it all, Juno. Don’t tell me you’ve never sat in the dark, waiting for someone to arrive in order to make a memorable entrance?”

“Not everyone is you, Ransom.”

“Hello?” Buddy called, striding forward. “Where’ve you—Peter, darling, would you mind getting the curtains?”

Ransom nodded, conjuring up a door and sticking his hand through it. Like some kind of messed up Ransom’s-long-arms-kaleidoscope, a door appeared by each of the windows inside, and the curtains were all pulled back at once.

And the vision in front of them was, to put it delicately, completely fucking grotesque.

Vespa and Buddy had cased the place before its closing, but in the weeks since the cleaning people had resigned and the building was (for the time being) left to rot, it had grown. Multiplied.  _ Spread. _

Long strings of plastic dangled from between the staircase banisters, flapping in the open door’s breeze and dripping oil everywhere like slimy stalactites. More oil, multicoloured where it hit the light, slipped down the stairs and pooled on the floor, mingling with the pinkish body fluids of dead and rotting animal carcasses. Fish and birds and rodents, split open, spilling guts and plastic for the fat swarms of flies to chew on.

The Archivist clapped her hands over the gas mask like she was trying not to squeak, or scream, or whatever other noises an Archivist makes. Steel made a sort of grunt, and audible swallow, which Vespa recognized from experience as “trying not to puke” sounds.

Mercury actually did vomit, loudly, into the bushes just outside the hotel.

As the Archivist patted his back, making hissing sounds through the mask that were maybe supposed to be comforting, Buddy and Vespa entered fully into the lobby, toward the person who had now seated herself comfortably on the lower steps of the staircase.

She was burly, thick shoulders and arms mottled with scars upon scars, new and old and overlapping for space. Her severe underbite left her bottom teeth exposed to the air, curved in a way that made them look like claws jutting out from between her lips. Between her pupils and her irises was a thin, glowing, orange ring.

“You the Aurinkos?” She asked with a very purposeful drawl. “The boss thought you lot would show up.”

“Did she now. Well, there goes the element of surprise, I suppose,” Buddy said, pulling off her gloves and tucking them into her pocket.

“Man, are you like, the mini-boss that we have to take down before we can get to the main guy?” Mercury panted from behind. He sounded like he was still wiping off his mouth, but Vespa didn’t turn to check.

“Sure, why not,” The piranha-woman grunted, standing up and shaking out her fists. “Are you ready to turn around yet, or do things have to get ugly?”

“Hm. It was quite a long journey,” Buddy replied, “I think we’re perfectly fine where we are.”

The woman shrugged. “Suit yourself.” With no further ado, she threw the first punch.

Buddy swerved backwards, knife already out of the holster on her thigh. She brought it up to the woman’s arm, scraping a red line along the skin. Another fist came flying, and Buddy swept back, slightly unsteady from being unable to fully regain her footing the first time. The woman followed after, right on top of her, surprisingly light on her feet for such a massive body.

The Piranha kept swinging, not letting up on the offense. For a second, she turned her back to Vespa.

That’s all the opportunity she needed.

Vespa sent a knife flying into the Piranha’s back. She didn’t bleed, but from the look of her, Vespa never really thought she was fully human in the first place. Instead, the skin and flesh cracked around the blade in her back, like it was made of rock or wood. Something dry crumbled out of the skin-canyon and spilled onto the floor.

Tightening her grip around the next knife, Vespa closed her eyes and breathed in, forcing herself to… to trust the others to help Buddy.

The Piranha stank of charred meat. Sun-scorched earth. Ash and smoke.

Vespa’s eyes shot open. The Desolation.

The oil on the ground. Oh God, the  _ oil. _

Her next knife was aimed for the Piranha’s head, but her hand shook, and it went wide. Voices that weren’t there began piping up around her ears, clamouring for attention, but she screwed her eyes shut, shook her head.

Steel managed two blaster shots to the Piranha’s shin, and she stumbled slightly on her next step forward, putting too much weight on her injured leg. She was weakened, and inside, the Hunt rumbled.

Before she could right herself, Vespa tried her signature move, throwing herself at the woman from behind, clinging onto her bulky shoulders and wrapping an arm around her neck. The Piranha bucked backwards, closing her hands around Vespa’s biceps to try to throw her off, but it was too late; Vespa plunged a knife into the Piranha’s throat, twisting and dragging it downwards.

What came out instead of blood was clumps of ash, pale and still hot to the touch. The Piranha wheezed, choked, released Vespa’s arms to claw at her throat, only causing the skin there to erode faster.

With that distraction, Buddy procured her blaster and pressed it to the Piranha’s gut, firing at point-blank range.

Vespa slid back onto her own two feet, watching, distantly, the Piranha sink to her knees and then buckle inwards, like the roof of a burning building. She lay there, limp, still leaking soot and cinders.

The others approached cautiously, Steel prodding the woman with his toe, Wire staring down like she’d seen a ghost. The Archivist continued to gesture and make loud, unintelligible noises behind her mask.

When it became clear that the Piranha wasn’t going to fully crumble to ash, Buddy addressed the group. “Now, does anyone here have any rope, or handcuffs? Sasha?”

Wire pulled a spool of rope out of another one of her pockets, handing it over, ignoring Mercury’s quiet “Like those magician handkerchiefs…” Buddy knelt down and began expertly enveloping the Piranha in the rope, crushing her arms to her body and crossing her ankles over each other.

Buddy began talking to the others again, but Vespa found her gaze drifting downwards, towards the Piranha. Her face was still twisted into a scowl, eyes closed, hands clenched into fists where they poked out of the rope, prison. Inside one of them, between her fingers, something glowed.

Like an ember. Like a spark.

She jolted. The oil. The  _ oil. _ It flooded the entire lobby floor, but if they could get high enough up the stairs…

The Piranha’s fist shone brighter.

“The stairs!” Vespa yelped. The rest of the group turned to stare at her. “Run for the stairs, idiots!”

Steel seemed to notice the Piranha’s hand as well, or whatever else tipped him off, because he grabbed the Archivist’s wrist and pulled her away. Wire tore off after them, and Mercury followed behind, confused. Ransom stepped backwards into a door of his.

Buddy gripped Vespa’s hand and together, they ran. As they climbed the stairs, a second behind the others, there was a sharp crackling, and then a  _ fwoom. _

Vespa and Buddy skidded onto the dry staircase landing, and below them, the lobby lit up orange.

*

“Freaking—goddamn elevator—”

“Shut your—” Vespa wheezed— “Shut your mouth, Steel.”

Ahead of them, on a landing in the dark staff stairwell, an absurdly long figure leaned against the wall. His glasses (and were they tinted a different colour, before?) flashed in the beam of their torches.

“You’re almost there!” He called, cheerful and condescending as ever. “The rooftop is just up ahead.”

“Bastard!” Steel yelled in reply. “You could’ve walked with us!”

“It appears I miscalculated the location of my exit door!”

“You just—” Steel broke off to pant for a second— “didn’t want to climb thirty stories!”

“Nothing you can prove, detective!”

Vespa snickered into the back of her hand. Steel rounded on her, flashlight in hand. “What are you lau—Jesus!”

Steel fumbled with the flashlight. Vespa squinted, lifting an arm against the glare. “You mind, Steel? Trying to fucking see here,”

“Why are your eyes like that?”

“Like  _ what?!” _

He made a completely useless gesture to his own eyes. “Your pupils are all, white and stuff!”

The Archivist once again began to garble words frantically, waving her hands around and bouncing on her heels when Vespa turned to look. Behind the panes of Wire’s gas mask, her eyes were wide, and excited.

“Does anyone here know how to translate?” Buddy asked.

Steel cleared his throat. “She says your eyes are white because of, um, tape something,” the Archivist huffed, and repeated herself. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. Tapetum lucidum. Layer of tissue behind the retinas, reflects light, yadda yadda yadda, basically, you should have night vision. Do you have night vision?”

“None of your business, Steel. The Eye tell her all of that?”

“Oh, no. She just had this massive cat phase a couple years back. And Rita never forgets.”

Mercury enthused, “Man, Vespa, you must be killer at hide-and-seek in the dark. And laser-tag!”

*

After the incident with the Desolation avatar, the rooftop was  _ cold. _ Miasma had chosen a particularly windy day to enact her dastardly plan, so the seven of them were left teetering precariously on the roof, Steel clinging to the stairwell door frame, nauseous.

Miasma herself turned at the sound of the door bursting open, and seven (six, minus Bambi-legged Steel) people spilling onto the concrete roof, panting and cursing each other. (Vespa and Steel did most of the cursing. The others just caught their breath.)

The avatar before them, sturdy as a pillar in the riptide-current of the wind, was sickening to look at. She was stick thin, not in the slender or lean sense of the word, but completely emaciated. It was hard to get a good look at her face through the hair that stuck to her skin, but what could be seen just added to the unhealthy display. Cracked lips and hateful eyes.

In her hands, she clutched something egg shaped. Vespa knew that look. Whitened knuckles and jittering fingers.

Miasma growled something to herself and turned away, kneeling to place the egg on the ground. Buddy pulled out her blaster.

“Hands in the air,” Buddy said, stepping closer. “Would you mind telling us what you plan on doing with that bomb?”

Lifting her hands and sloping her shoulders, Miasma faced them fully. “I hope you know what a  _ stupid  _ question that is,” (Whitened knuckles and jittering fingers. Obsession.)

Of course, they already knew what the bomb was going to do. Buddy and the Archivist had seen the blueprints.

Buddy hummed. “Perhaps you’re right. But please. Humour us. What is one highly-acclaimed scientist doing with a weapon of mass destruction?”

“This has nothing to do with you.” Miasma bristled. “Walk away, now.”

“A ritual is one thing,” Buddy took another step forward. “But when you plan on ending all life on this planet, well, we simply have to get involved. You understand, I’m sure.”

“It won’t be quick. You’ll have plenty of fear to consume in the meantime.”

“And after that, we’ll die,” Buddy flipped the safety off her blaster. “You must know the only thing keeping you or I alive are the dread powers. If the humans die, the fear goes with them, and eventually so will we.”

“You will. The ritual will keep me going for a long time.”

“Then I suppose we’re at an impasse.” Buddy took aim, and fired.

The blast hit Miasma directly in the abdomen. A hole was seared clean through, black around the edges. Miasma looked down.

She sneered, “You didn’t truly think that would work?”

Buddy sighed, not lowering the gun. “Worth a try, I suppose.”

And she kept shooting. Wire joined in. Sometimes they would miss. Sometimes they would hit her. It didn’t make a difference. Miasma was made of dough, of children’s plasticine. Nothing slowed her as she reached down and placed her hand on the bomb.

Not good. This was one problem Vespa couldn’t solve by slitting someone’s throat.

“Archivist!” she barked. The woman in question jumped. “You know how to deactivate the bomb?”

“Mrph!” The Archivist replied, giving a thumbs up.

Vespa’s hand drifted towards her knife holster, still dusted with soot. In front of them, Miasma stood up on skeletal legs, crowing, “Do you want to know what the bomb will do?”

Knife gripped in hand, Vespa grabbed the Archivist’s arm and whispered, “Go. Now. Steel and I will cover you.” She shot a pointed look to Steel, who was still staring at the rooftop’s edge.

“It is going to send clouds of ash into the air,” Miasma continued. “It’s going to fill the atmosphere until not a crack of sun can be seen and then, slowly, the planet will begin to die.”

“I will bring Rita to the bomb,” Ransom interjected softly. “Do try to distract Miasma in the meantime.”

“Imagine; the world in darkness. No one knows what’s happening or how to fix it. It’s not all at once. The sun disappears and the plants begin to wilt. Then the smaller animals start dying.”

Without prompting, Wire slowly pulled something cylindrical out of her pocket, and reached backwards to shove it into Vespa’s free hand, still staring straight ahead. Wire then pressed her hand flat onto her own thigh, fingers splayed, and deliberately tucked her thumb underneath her palm. A countdown.

“It will take years. And there will be nothing anyone can do but sit there and wait for the food to run out.”

Vespa pulled the pin on the smoke grenade. (Three fingers.) She crouched down. Rolling the grenade across the rooftop, past Wire and Buddy’s legs (two), it landed inches away from Miasma’s feet.

“And then the world will be empty and the Extinction—”

(One.)

The can started streaming pale smoke. Ransom pulled the Archivist through one of his doors. Miasma wobbled back, face twisting. If her eyes were hateful before, they were incandescent now, shining and crackling and freezing. 

Her flesh began to wriggle.

It bunched up and roiled like an angry, helpless tide, skin stretching around the flabby things that grew from her, twisting and lashing around.

It was, Vespa observed, almost like the flowers that grew in the ponds around her childhood house. The rapidly-sprouting tentacles curled outwards offensively, rippling in the icy rooftop wind. (One writhed in the direction of Buddy, to be lobbed off by one of Vespa’s knives.) In the centre, the eye of the cluster of fleshy limbs, Miasma made eye contact with Vespa for one second.

Then the smoke took over and nearly everything was lost to the foggy white. But Vespa had good eyes.

There’s the outline of Buddy and Wire, stepping backwards. Vespa knew Buddy wasn't willing to risk hitting a teammate by shooting blindly. Steel sort of sighed, probably because he can’t see over the edge of the roof anymore. The occasional tentacle appeared, waving aimlessly. And then; the silhouettes of Ransom and the Archivist emerging from something rectangular.

(The sudden sensory deprivation, the muted sounds and rapidly shrinking range of vision, made her stomach shrivel and her hands shake. This, in turn, meant there were shapes that weren’t there, too. Her father, fifteen feet tall from her memory’s perspective. Rasbach lurking at the corner of her vision, leering in a way that made her scars itch.

She looked away, and hoped neither of them would start talking.)

Vespa fumbled, grabbed onto a shoulder she thought was Buddy’s. Judging from the familiar huff and hand that comes up to grip her own, she was right. (Or Wire was acting really weird.) The Archivist skidded to her knees, picking up the pear-shaped bomb that started all of this in the first place. She turned it over and pressed the underside, against the button to disarm it.  _ One. _

But then—

Then Miasma’s outline appeared again, wavering liquid as her body melted and morphed. A tentacle thrashed forward and struck the Archivist, who fell back with a yelp, still clutching the bomb.  _ Two. _

Miasma didn’t stop there, still advancing forward, flailing appendages following. Her eyes didn’t glow, not like the Piranha’s, but the Archivist must be close enough now to see Miasma’s face through the fog.

(Glittering, hateful eyes.)  _ Three. _

Ransom stepped over the Archivist, who was hunched over the bomb, to stand in front of her. (For all his airheadedness, he wasn’t stupid, or, or even overly selfish. He was the one to tell them about Miasma in the first place.)  _ Four. _ Despite his  _ ridiculously  _ long limbs, they weren’t tentacles, and he could only slice away so many at a time.

The entire thing was a shadow-puppet show. Vespa squinted harder, squinted to see beyond the fog.

A tentacle forced its way past Ransom and wrapped around the egg. Ransom cleaved it off before it could pull, but it was close.  _ Five. _ They’d almost lost the bomb back to Miasma because of one second of sloppiness.

From beside Vespa, there was the whirr of a blaster turning on. The look on Buddy’s face was familiar from heists that rapidly turned south, from teammates’ betrayal and face-to-face shootouts. The smoke began to clear, but not enough to eliminate the risk of hitting Ransom or Rita. Resigned determination. Miasma couldn’t get that bomb back.

She lifted the gun to fire the first volley—

—Another shape appeared amongst the smoke. Not a hallucination, or a tentacle. Shorter than Ransom, taller than the Archivist. Steel.

Blaster in hand, he advanced on Miasma. Close enough to fire point-blank and splatter away the appendages at their base.  _ Six. _ Unperturbed, Miasma kept growing them back, and turned away from him, back to clutching for the egg.

A tight breeze blew at the smoke, cleared it enough to see this weird look on Steel’s face.  _ Seven. _ A look Vespa almost recognized from herself.

He lunged for Miasma. Pushed past the tentacles. Threw punches at her actual body. She was so skinny, so starved.  _ Eight. _

The two of them grappled too close to the edge. When would Steel realize? Any moment now, and he’d shout and jump like a spooked dog, back away from the rim of the rooftop. Vespa snapped her mouth shut, about to say something really stupid, like,  _ Jesus, Steel, watch your fucking feet and  _ be careful.

Wire shifted from foot to foot, fiddling with her blaster. She couldn’t shoot without hitting Steel.  _ Nine. _ The last dregs of smoke drifted away, and Ransom was stumbling (stumbling, like a baby deer, eyes wide, grace evaporated along with the smoke) forward, yelling something at Steel.

Miasma paused for a second, hissing, as she and Steel teetered on the lip of the building. She rasped something to Steel, tentacles curling.

In response, Steel looked down, down the thirty-story drop. He jolted visibly. Grabbed Miasma by the arms (her real arms, however warped they were).

Pulled her over the edge.

Vespa blinked, and where Steel and Miasma had been standing was empty space.

Empty space.

Buddy lowered her blaster. Wire dropped hers. Mercury was saying something frantically, in higher and higher pitches.

The figures of Ransom and the Archivist disappeared faster than anyone could process, as Ransom yanked her with him through one of his doors. (Vespa didn’t glimpse either of their faces. She didn’t want to.)

What do the rest of them do? Vespa’s legs jerked, ready to, what, run down the stairs after them?

Mercury’s voice kept getting louder, but Vespa couldn’t hear. If the Archivist didn’t let go of the egg… it was over? Her knees seemed to have a magnetic pull to the rooftop below, and Vespa slowly, like a rotting building, began to collapse. Her knives clattered out of her hands, skittering across the concrete.

Something that might’ve been the Hunt told her not to let her guard down, but all Vespa could see was a lobby going up in flames and a woman’s flesh turning fluid on her bones and Steel disappearing over the fringe of the building.

“Guys,  _ look out!” _

Mercury broke through the white noise in Vespa’s head. She half turned, looking behind her. A flash of charred skin, wicked teeth, and orange-ringed eyes.

“Caught you, Huntress,” the Piranha crowed. And then everything became dry and smoky and smothering and

_ Hot. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ruh roh raggy !
> 
> It felt out of character as I was writing it, but the idea of Vespa saying “trying to fucking see here” was just too funny for me to edit out.
> 
> If you're worried I might've forgotten about the man the myth the legend Mister Jet Siquliak, do not worry ! He will appear. At some point.
> 
> (bonus: psst, if there was major character death in this fic, I would've tagged it as such ...)

**Author's Note:**

> (to clarify: vespa is not being turned into a werewolf/any sort of animal by the Hunt, like Daisy Tonner is in tma. This'll be touched on later in the fic, but the muzzling is based on Rasbach making false assumptions.)
> 
> honestly my original idea for having sasha wire as one of the assistants was "haha wouldn't it be funny if there was another sasha as an achival assistant like in og tma" but then ms wire got her own whole-ass character arc (of which we'll see more next chapter) GOD help me ...
> 
> i'll post a list of who's an avatar for what in the notes of the last chapter, in case i don't make it 100% clear by then. chap 2 will be up at some undefinable point.
> 
> my tumblr is @brightwritesstuff.


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